


The Private Detective's Songbook

by ma_malice



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, M/M, Moderate burn, Private Eye Shane, Prohibition, Shane gets hit a LOT, Spiritualist Ryan, noir typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:48:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23354932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ma_malice/pseuds/ma_malice
Summary: The man who had rented the room before him had also been a PI, and so Detective Shane Madej’s door still read CC TINSLEY & ASSOCIATES, PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS in peeling gold letters.Along with the door, he’d inherited Tinsley’s desk, his reputation, and one badly-lit corridor’s worth of neighbors. These included a disreputable tattooist, an off-book accountant and, of course, The Mystic Oracle: Spirit Connexions and Communications.LA, 1927 – Shane’s a jaded Private Eye. Ryan’s a two-bit Spiritualist. Together, they’re going to solve a murder.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 213
Kudos: 339





	1. Help Me to Help My Neighbor

The man who had rented the room before him had also been a PI, and so Detective Shane Madej’s door still read _CC TINSLEY & ASSOCIATES, PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS_ in peeling gold letters. Shane had never been told who these associates were, but he’d once found five empty bottles behind a trick panel in Tinsley’s old desk, and since then he’d considered the case solved.

As well as the door and desk, he had inherited Tinsley’s reputation, a handful of his old clients, and one badly-lit corridor’s worth of neighbors. Apart from Shane, the dingy, brown-tiled sixth floor contained a disreputable tattooist who inked the dock workers and visiting sailors; a sad-faced accountant who Shane suspected of catering entirely to the bootleggers; a few discreet and perfumed rooms; and, of course, _The Mystic Oracle: Spirit Connexions and Communications_ , which occupied the room directly opposite his own.

Behind the fantastical name on its small silver plaque was Ryan – a pint-sized spiritualist and the only person in the building Shane ever spoke to. Ryan took his business very seriously, offered to ‘read’ for Shane nearly every time they met, and was generally the sort of person Harry Houdini would have publicly slapped. Shane hadn’t yet figured out if Ryan was running an elaborate con or if he genuinely believed the bullshit he peddled, but both options made Shane feel uneasy, so he never gave the matter much thought. It was enough to have a neighbor who set hello when they met in the dismal hallway, who didn’t habitually smell of stale tobacco and raw spirits, and who at least knocked before he entered Shane’s office.

Or at least, it had been. Shane tossed the letter from his landlord onto the over-cluttered desk. Another year, another rent hike. This one was going to turn him out. Professionally, he dealt mainly in petty theft and family squabble, minor affairs and affronts. They didn’t pay well, when they paid at all, and so unless he started mixing it up with rum-runners and crooked informants, this dark, dripping room was now a luxury Shane could no longer afford.

He’d been in LA for less than three years; it was growing on him black mold. LA dripped off the politicians and police and producers, grew in the alleys and speakeasies and backlots, and then crawled up onto the shoes of anyone who stood still long enough. On a quiet day, Shane could feel LA getting into his blood and coating his muscles. Everything he touched was filthy, every case he took was tainted. The longer he spent gumshoeing through the human catastrophe that was Los Angeles, the less he cared. And now, on top of that, he was going to have to _pack_.

A soft knock at the door cut through his misery, and before Shane could recompose himself into a more dignified position, the Mystic Oracle himself stepped into the room.

“Hey,” Ryan said, already mostly through the door. “Can I come in a minute?”

Shane took his feet off the desk. “You got a crime that needs solving?”

“Yeah, my heat’s gone out and I want to file a complaint.”

“Oh really? Get in line.”

Without asking, Ryan came over made himself comfortable in Shane’s other chair. Just as potential clients found Shane more trustworthy if he dressed neatly, so Ryan’s victims apparently considered him a more believable charlatan if he forwent ties and vests, appearing in shirt-sleeves and suspenders, with obscure symbols hanging from a chain around his neck. Sometimes, Shane worried about Ryan starting a cult.

“Busy day?” he asked, looking meaningfully at the spot Shane’s feet had recently vacated.

“I’m mulling,” Shane said. “Thinking things over. Letting connections grow in my unhurried brain. My keen detective’s mind is never at rest.”

“Right, of course,” Ryan said, grinning slyly. Shane indulged in being thoroughly irritated by this for a moment, before Ryan continued. “Did they, uh – I don’t want to pry, but is your rent going up? I can’t tell if it’s just me they’re trying to push out.”

“Because our landlord has finally realized you’re a fraud who doesn’t provide any useful service,” Shane agreed. “Yes, that makes sense.” Normally, this would get an easy rise out of the Ryan, a balled-up paper thrown past Shane’s ear or an indignant lecture. Not today.

“No, because of – well –” Ryan gestured broadly to himself and Shane understood. Not for nothing was he the building’s best private eye.

It was true that Ryan was the only non-white guy on their floor. Shane strongly suspected that Ryan’s awful clients thought this meant he had a deeper connection to the spiritual, which only made Shane hate the whole business more.

“Oh,” he said, feeling like an asshole. “No, I got one too. A letter. They’re squeezing us all.”

“Right,” said Ryan. “Well, they must have realized the value of this place.”

“I’ve barely seen a roach all year,” Shane agreed. “And the ceiling drips have almost stopped. It’s a small cost for quality.”

That made Ryan laugh a little, at least.

“If you saw this coming, you could have warned me,” Shane continued. “I mean what’s the point of having –” he lowered his voice dramatically, “– an _occultist_ for a neighbor if he’s not even going to give you a week’s notice when the rent’s going up?”

“You know that’s not what I do,” Ryan said sternly.

“Ryan, I have no idea what you do. You could be forming a ghost quartet in there, for all I know.”

Ryan gave him a deeply unimpressed look. This, really, was where he earned his keep as a neighbor. He said hello in the mornings, he probably wasn’t going to get Shane murdered by bootleggers, and he was very, very amusing to rile up.

“Can you afford the new rent?” he asked.

“Well,” Shane said. “No. Not really. You?”

“Absolutely not,” Ryan said. “I can barely afford the current rent.”

There it was, then. Time for them both to move out. Maybe Shane could find an office that didn’t turn into a steeple-chase of buckets whenever it rained, that didn’t have another man’s name on the door. He wouldn’t miss the automated elevator, or the congealed oatmeal color of the tiles. He wouldn’t miss the cloud of sickly incense that billowed down the hall every time Ryan opened his door. He probably wouldn’t even miss Ryan, after a while. It would be fine. He’d even gotten a free desk out it.

Ryan cleared his throat. He moved one of Shane’s files so he could put an elbow on the desk. “I thought,” he started. “I mean, I was only going to ask if you were in trouble too, but neither of us actually use our offices the whole day, do we?”

Shane did spend more time in the back alleys and gambling dens of LA than he’d really like. What Ryan did, on the other hand, was as an unknown country.

“Don’t you?” Shane asked, perhaps a little too accusingly. “Where do you go? What do you do?”

Ryan shrugged. “If people want to contact a presence they feel in their home, I’ll go to them. Or I cleanse houses, sometimes.”

“Of _what_?”

“Spirits, obviously,” said Ryan. “Ghosts and stuff.”

“Ghosts,” Shane repeated, “and stuff. You cannot be serious.”

Ryan puffed up like an offended cat. Shane leaned back in his chair to better enjoy the spectacle.

“One day,” Ryan said, pointing aggressively, “you will need my help with a spirit-related matter and I’m going to do nothing.”

“I’ll just have to manage somehow,” Shane said peacefully.

“What I was _trying_ to say,” Ryan continued, “is that we could share. Maybe. An office. Rent would actually o down if we split, and we could arrange hours around each other. Save us both having to move.”

Shane very carefully kept his face perfectly impartial as Ryan drew out a scrap of paper, on which he’d actually drawn up the numbers for how this would work. They were good numbers. Ryan was a good neighbor. It would be, not to put too fine a point on the matter, fucking fantastic if Shane didn’t have to move.

Shane eyed Ryan suspiciously. Ryan looked back, all open honesty. This was, Shane was certain, exactly how people got fleeced so badly that the bank hobbled their cars and the electricity board shut off their lights.

“Alright then,” Shane said. “Your office or mine?”

***

Over the next week, Shane restored two strings of lost pearls to their owners, uncovered one man living between three oblivious families, spent five hours explaining to a Mrs. J. that her small dog was missing, not kidnapped, and helped Ryan move into what was now their shared office.

They’d decided to keep Shane’s room, having discovered that his desk couldn’t actually fit through the door, and so Shane had carried across innumerable boxes of mysterious tchotchkes while Ryan stepped on his toes and shifted his papers and demonstrated that, despite being approximately five inches tall, he was capable of shifting Tinsley’s oak monstrosity across the room single-handedly.

Then, on Tuesday morning as agreed, Shane made himself scarce and went to sit in Elysian Park, so that Ryan could unpack and catch up on the many grifts he was doubtless running

Shane turned a page of the paper he was half-hidden behind. Above him, the open sky was a depthless, pearly white, diffuse light shining flatly off the grass, and the water, and the wedding ring of a man currently conducting a very public affair.

He had followed Mr. Collins here on the hire of the man’s wife, a woman who had seemed more on the verge of homicide than tears, and a woman who knew that a man coming home after she was asleep six nights a week was a man up to no good.

Now it seemed Shane had found both the _up to_ and the _no good_. He watched as Collins nuzzled deeper into the woman’s fur collar. Shane had hoped this would be one of your dime a dozen illicit rendezvous, that the pair would meet and then quickly cut out for some sordid hotel, but he’d been sitting here long enough to get uncomfortable. He’d been here so long he’d actually read parts of his newspaper – breathless rhapsodizing about what those crazy Hollywood types would do with Vitaphone next; the drawn-out trial of a local mobster.

If Collins was willing to spend over an hour in a public park, surrounded on all sides by diseased pigeons, suspicious men in greatcoats, and underpaid PIs, this wasn’t casual fun. This was the utter idiocy of a love affair.

Shane sighed and ruffled his paper ostentatiously. The threat of rain was streaking the sky with gray. He wondered what was worse: the grimy truth he was paid to unearth, or the bright lies that Ryan spun. Maybe Mrs. Collins had been right to glance wonderingly over at Ryan’s side of the office. Ryan could have taken one look at her drawn, furious face, and told her that mystical forces had indicated she’d soon be free of a burden. Shane was going to have to sit down and tell her she’d soon be free of a marriage.

He folded up his paper and left it on the bench, stretching the numbness from his legs. There was no point staying any longer – the facts of the matter were abundantly clear. He would go back to his little room, put his head down on his desk, and intensely hate the human race for a few hours before he called Mrs. Collins and broke the news. Or perhaps …

Before he could think better of it, Shane turned and strode over the to man he was supposed to be discreetly tailing, bent close so the lady wouldn’t hear and whispered, “Your wife wouldn’t be happy about this,” directly into Collins ear.

For a brief moment as he straightened up, Shane felt the glow of righteous satisfaction. Then Collins leapt to his feet and hit him in the mouth.

***

LA, sunk into violence and vice, always made good on its threats: by the time Shane arrived back, rain was being wrung from a sky the color of an old dish rag. He detoured to the fourth-floor washrooms to rinse blood off his teeth, then took the last two flights on foot – damp through, clutching a wad of paper towel to his split lip, and incredibly frustrated with his life as a whole.

Before he could reach his door, it opened to divulge a very neat, very dry man who touched his hat to Shane and left the door ajar behind him, bouncing away towards the elevator on the balls of his feet. Through the sliver of open door, the office seemed dim and shadowed, full, no doubt, of fresh insults against Shane’s common sense. Sighing, he stepped inside.

The room curled with candle smoke. The tiny window had been covered and the flickering light from a circle of tall wax candles formed deep recesses of shadow across the room, in Shane’s jumble of cabinets and corkboards and shelves, over Ryan’s haunted junkyard of indeterminate items.

“Can you get the light?”

Ryan was standing over his table, looking occultish but benevolent. Shane had never seen him at work before, and now he realized he’d been missing out on a sight. At the height of his ridiculous powers, Ryan looked like a weird preacher, his face softly lit by the candles, his sleeves rolled back to the elbow, as though he were about to physically reach into the future and drag a prophecy back. There was a scatter of playing cards on the table, which itself had itself been draped in no less than five gauzy cloths. It was a fire hazard, if nothing else.

“Working hard?” Shane asked as he flipped the light-switch by the door. The sudden glare of an exposed bulb did little to dispel the scene. Stuffed with both of their things, the room now had a permanently frenetic, overcluttered look. Everywhere Shane looked, there was another of Ryan’s arcane silver trinkets, or a bundle of candles, or a jar of herbs. Yesterday, he’d found a strange glass bowl in his top drawer.

Ryan gave a non-committal shrug as he snuffed candles, then finally looked up at Shane and started.

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

“Another satisfied customer.” Shane could feel the smoke getting into his nose. “I’m a well-regarded professional.”

Ryan made a horrified noise and hurried over, grabbing Shane’s hand and pulling it away from his face to peer up at the damage. Shane, who had just watched a man ruin a marriage, and then been hit hard enough to fall over, wasn’t particularly in the mood to be touched. He shied away, wrenching out of Ryan’s grasp violently enough to throw them both off-balance.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, snatching his own hand back. “I think you need ice, or a compress, or something. Sorry.”

“No, it’s – sorry,” Shane said as well, carefully touching his tongue to his lip and immediately regretting it. A stilted silence dragged out between them. “Who was that?”

“Just a reading,” Ryan said. His eyes kept darting to Shane’s mouth. “Usual guy. He keeps asking me what stocks he should buy, and I keep telling him that it doesn’t work like that.”

Shane frowned. That sounded like a ridiculous lie, but not like the exploitation of someone in the throes of grief, which was where he’d privately decided he’d draw the line. At the first sign of a black armband or a face full of tears, he’d confront Ryan. Until, then, though …

“So, no financial advice from the ghouls,” he said sagely. “I will note that down.”

Ryan made a strangled sound of disbelief. “Tarot doesn’t involve _ghouls_ ,” he said. “Oh my God.”

“What does it involve then, Ryan?” Shane said, settling comfortably into the argument. He knew what answer he wanted. He wanted to be told it involved a good cold read, an airy voice, a lot of confidence and a kind smile. He wanted to be brought in on the con, trusted with the knowledge of exactly how Ryan was swindling the people who came to him for insight, and how he emotionally manipulated the recently bereaved for pay.

That was not, of course, the answer he got.

“I’m actually pretty good at it,” Ryan said. “Sit down, I’ll show you.”

He gestured to the awkward round table that clunked heavily if you put any weight on its edges. There was a second seat pulled up – less a chair and more a kind of squat velvet mushroom. Shane eyed it warily. His mouth ached. His hands stung where they’d made contact with the ground. He absolutely did not want his fortune told. With some difficulty, he folded himself down onto the little stool anyway.

Ryan had already scooped up his cards, and was shuffling them from hand to hand.

“So, think of what you want to know,” he said. “Hold that question in your mind.”

_What the fuck is your deal, Bergara?_ Shane thought, raising his eyebrows at Ryan. Ryan split the deck into three piles and set them out in front of him.

“Now, choose one.”

“How?”

“Uh, you can just point at it.”

Shane glowered. “No, I mean, am I supposed to be feeling _drawn_ to one of these?” A single candle was still burning, throwing dancing light over the blue and black cross-hatch of the cards. Shane felt ridiculous, and very, very tired.

Ryan shrugged. “Sometimes the right card will feel warmer than the others. Sometimes you’ve just gotta let your subconscious do it.”

Shane stabbed a finger into the middle stack and Ryan picked it up to recommence shuffling. “Still thinking of your question?” he asked.

“No, I’m thinking about how much of our rent you pay playing solitaire.”

Ryan laughed. “Ok, well, you’ve got to think of your question.”

Shane narrowed his eyes purposefully at Ryan, who chose three cards and laid them face down on the table. He was not thinking of his question. He was wondering why he’d let himself get caught up in this.

“This is a really simple spread, just past, present, future,” Ryan explained. “So, first card – oh.” He paused, frowning down at the image he’d just revealed. Instead of a suite card, Shane was looking down at the figure of a man in gray robes, standing alone in a world of flat blue-grey shading. In one hand he held a lantern, golden rays of light stabbing out into nothing.

“How long have I got left, doc?” Shane said easily and Ryan’s frown deepened.

“It’s a past card, and you’re clearly not dead,” he said. “I normally pull this – never mind.” He finally looked up to meet Shane’s querying gaze. “The Hermit. You keep your own counsel. You’ve been lonely. You’re trying to figure something out, but you haven’t yet.”

That was surely cheating, Shane thought, because look at his life. Of course he was lonely. “Hmm,” he said.

Ryan flipped the next card, this time a man making off with what was, frankly, an unnecessary number of swords. “Oh, a new undertaking. You’re in a new situation. Well, obviously. I could have told you that for free.”

“You’d better be telling me this for free, Bergara, I’m not paying you.”

“We’ll see,” Ryan said. He turned over the final card. “Nine of Cups. That’s a good sign – success, good-health, wealth. All good things.”

“Great,” Shane said. “We can use some of that to fix the heating. Can I see those?”

Ryan obligingly swept up the deck and put it in Shane’s hands. He watched as Shane turned them over, examining the cast of miniature fortune tellers, most of whom seemed to have an unhealthy interest in edged weapons.

“They’re not marked,” Ryan said mildly. 

“How do I know you’re not just making up bullshit?” Shane asked. “Look at this man –” He held out a figure in a bright red cloak who was brandishing a baton. “– he could mean anything.”

“Stop getting your skeptic energy on my deck,” Ryan said, taking the cards back. “And he means skill and manifestation. You might not know that but most of the people I speak to do.”

“So, what’s the trick?”

“There’s no trick,” Ryan said, infuriatingly calm. “I’m just good at this. Something about me makes it easier for the cards to work.” Then he smiled slyly. “It’s my superior knowledge of other-worldly matters.”

Shane snorted so hard it hurt. “Oh, okay, is that was it is? Here, I thought it was just your superior knowledge of sleight of hand.”

“Seriously, the cards aren’t marked.” Ryan swept them back into a little draw-string bag and snuffed the last candle with two fingertips. “You don’t have to believe in me, but it wouldn’t kill you to believe this very basic fact I am telling you.”

“Fine, the cards aren’t marked. They’re still bullshit.” 

“You’re bullshit,” Ryan muttered and Shane laughed. Then Ryan got up to un-drape the window and Shane was left to face the fact that he might actually have to put some time into filing and organizing his notes. Every day he had more and more respect for Tinsley’s ‘ _hide the bastards in the walls_ ’ methodology of administration. 

“Did you know the man who used to have this office?” he asked, returning to his own side of the room. “I know you’ve been here longer than me.”

“Uh, I think I met him once or twice,” Ryan said, now whipping the gauzy cloth of his table and folding it up. “He wasn’t what you’d call _chatty_.”

He must have been incredibly taciturn, to avoid Ryan’s aggressive overtures of conversation. Maybe he’d been a Pinkerton, Shane thought. They weren’t exactly friendly.

“What happened to him?” he asked. “I mean, why would he abandon such bountiful riches as this desk, this airless room?”

Ryan wheezed a quiet laugh, and then looked thoughtful. “I think he got caught up in some things he shouldn’t have.”

Shane was deeply interested in this. He’d been prising the man’s case notes out of crawl spaces for over a year, and if Tinsley had managed to get himself killed or kidnapped working out of this office, Shane wanted to know about it.

“Like, what – bootleggers? Like mob? Like a furious client who strongly believes their dog is the center of an international kidnapping ring?”

Ryan looked up, eyebrows raised. “Like, I didn’t ask,” he said. “Seeing as how I wanted to keep breathing.”

“I should probably change the door,” Shane said under his breath.

“About that –” Ryan looked nervous again, like he had the day he’d suggested combining offices. “How would you feel about scraping the whole pane and putting up something combined?”

“Oh no,” Shane said at once. “No. Nope. I’m not writing Shane Madej, Ghost Detective on my door. Absolutely not. You can do what you want with your half of it, but I am Shane Madej, Private Investigator, and I will remain that way.”

“Technically, you’re CC Tinsley and Associates, Private Investigators,” Ryan said. “But sure.”

“Thanks for the free nonsense, though,” Shane said cheerily. “I appreciate the work you do to keep this business afloat.”

Ryan rolled his eyes dramatically, and went back to doing whatever it was card sharps did to keep their skills keen. Uncovered, the tiny window washed the scene in drowsy light: outside it was still raining from a sky the same flat gray that Shane had seen on the Hermit’s card. The lantern, its little yellow light reaching through a solid mist, steadily searching. Finding nothing. 

***

On Wednesday afternoon, Shane opened the door on a wave of static. Ryan was futzing with a battered looking radio, sleeves rolled up to the elbow again, one loop of his suspenders dangling off his shoulder.

“Did we drop that?” Shane asked, setting his field notes and a new roll of twine down on his overcrowded desk. “Because I don’t think it’s working.”

“It’s working fine,” Ryan said without looking up. Every now and then the radio spat out something that could have almost been a word, then dissolved back into white noise. It was very quickly hammering its way into Shane’s head.

“What are you doing, Ryan?” he hazarded. Technically, Ryan’s office hours had ended five minutes ago, so he’d forfeited his right to privacy. “And more importantly, can you stop? Please?”

“Shhh,” Ryan hissed, jotting something down. Then he asked, “Do you know where you are?”

Shane almost answered, then he realized that Ryan was _talking to the radio_.

“How long – oh,” Ryan said, taking another note. The radio suddenly burst forth in a tangle of indistinct voices and, horrified, Shane realized that Ryan thought the radio was _talking back_.

“I think the signal’s stronger with two of us in the room,” Ryan murmured, and this time he was talking to Shane, glancing up to meet his eyes. “Come and stand over here.”

Stunned and appalled, Shane understood for the first time that he had, in fact, moved in with an occultist. He walked over to stand next to Ryan. The radio blurted a garbled noise in response.

“Your wife?” Ryan clarified, even though the snatch of syllables hadn’t sounded anything like the words. “Can you send her here? To us?”

“What? No,” Shane said. Ryan waved him down. The radio muttered.

“We’ll do everything we can,” Ryan said.

“What, _no_ ,” Shane repeated. He had the sudden thought that Ryan couldn’t hear him, was sunk into some kind of trance. Then Ryan reeled off an address, _their_ address and Shane felt his concern evaporate.

“What are you _doing_?” Shane hissed.

“Okay,” Ryan said, still ignoring him. “Okay.” He reached to turn the radio off, and silence fell over the room like a heavy weight.

“What was that?” Shane demanded.

Ryan looked up at him as though he’d only just realized Shane was in the room. “Shane,” he said, clear-eyed but worried. “Have you ever investigated a murder?”

There was a point in every case where the shape of things became clear. Not the answer, not the solution, just the essential nature of the matter, the contours of what had happened and was yet to happen. This felt like one of those moments. For a second, Shane grasped the shape of what Ryan was asking, the depth of it, how far down he’d have to dive for his feet to touch bottom.

“ _What_?” Shane said. “ _No._ ”

Ryan bit his lip. “Neither have I,” he admitted. “So, I think I’m going to need your help with this.”

“Ryan. Please. With respect. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Someone contacted me” Ryan said, waving a hand vaguely. “I think he’s been killed. There was, sort of – _blood_ in his voice? He’s with his wife. I told him to try and send her to us.”

For a moment, Shane just stared at him. This pocket-sized augur who heard words in white noise and told the future with playing cards. Why had he picked _Shane_?

“You can’t possibly know that,” Shane finally said. “Is this like a phone conversation? Are you taking calls from the dead?”

Ryan’s mouth pulled down unhappily. “No, it’s not like a conversation. It’s more like … whispers. I can catch the edges of things, the tone. This –” he gestured to the radio, “– helps. But it’s more like interpretation than conversation.”

“And you’ve _interpreted_ that this man has been murdered?”

“I think so.”

“And you’ve told his … ghost … to supernaturally prod his wife to come to us for help in solving this entirely unproved murder?”

“You’re being an asshole,” Ryan said. Shane had been told he was a great many things over the course of his career, but never so mildly. He was still so blindsided by being presented with a _ghost murder_ that he forgot to defend himself.

The rain drummed faintly against the window and the roof. Neither of them spoke. Ryan didn’t offer to bring him in on the con. He didn’t offer any explanation at all.

“Are you … serious about this?” Shane tried, hesitantly.

“You know that I am,” Ryan said shortly.

“You’re sure you don’t want to, I don’t know, tell me that you’ve been scamming people this whole time? Please?”

Ryan’s head snapped up. “Is that what you think?” he said in a low voice.

“Ryan, we share a building with at least three illegal business ventures. It wouldn’t be unthinkable.”

“Well I’m not one of them,” Ryan declared, eyes bright and fierce.

“Okay, alright.” Shane put his hands up in surrender. “Fine. Let’s agree to disagree on the prospect of talking to the radio –”

“So, you just think I’m making this up? Is that what we’re going to agree on?”

“Maybe you’re just –”

“Just what, lying to you?”

“Maybe you’re just very in touch with the universe,” Shane tried, rapidly losing purchase on the conversation. “Maybe you’re very good at picking up context clues and this is how your brain gives them to you. But, Ryan – ghosts seeking vengeance? Ryan.”

“Fine,” Ryan said, wrapping his arms around his stomach and looking furious. “Don’t believe me. But I still need your help.”

Shane wanted, a little bit, to scream. “Fine,” he said. “If a woman comes through that door because her dead husband told her to, I will do everything in my power to help _and_ I’ll let you keep the fee.”

“Fine.” Ryan’s posture relaxed, just a little. “I still think you’re an asshole for assuming I was cheating people,” he said. “But fine.”

“I mean, I still agreed to let you move in,” Shane said. “Even though I did maybe think that.”

“Yeah, which makes _you_ an asshole. Wait, are you cheating _your_ clients? Because that’s sort of low.”

“I’m not!” Shane protested. “I am the greater LA area’s premier authority on lost necklaces and cheating husbands.”

Ryan nodded to the side of Shane’s face that was still swollen. “Clearly.”

“This was an outlier.”

“Of course.”

“What, a ghost has never punched you for getting too familiar?”

Ryan’s mouth twitched. “No,” he said. “I have literally never been punched in the mouth by a ghost for any reason.”

“Well, how good at your job can you be?”

Finally, Ryan’s expression broke and he laughed. “Did you hit your head when you went down yesterday? Do you need me to shine a light in your eyes?”

“Don’t you dare,” Shane said.

It was bad enough being caught by the flashes of Ryan’s blinding sincerity. And there was no doubt in Shane’s mind, now, that he _was_ sincere.

He turned his attention to neatening up the room, as company was apparently on her way, and found that this new knowledge didn’t tarnish his enjoyment of Ryan.

Even though the man genuinely believed he could talk to ghosts. Even though he was about to drag Shane down that particular garden path with him. At least he was honest about it. In a city painted with cynicism, it was almost a relief; like the first breath of air after a snowfall had washed the sky – cold and clear.

***

Three hours later and it looked like Shane was going to be right again. Late afternoon had passed with no sign of Ryan’s widow. The rain had cleared, and now the new streetlamps were being lit against a poisonous pink sunset. Shane would have been almost glad to see their mystery woman, if only so he could go home. Almost. 

He’d been telling the truth, before. He’d never investigated a homicide, or any case that involved a body. He knew Tinsley had, based on the notebooks he kept uncovering in unlikely places, and some days Shane thought it might be a mark against his professional legitimacy.

With the real possibility of an imminent corpse, however, he realized he’d be happy dealing entirely in absent husbands and unpaid loans for the remainder of his career. At least Ryan was also looking discomforted by the idea of rummaging about in a murder, despite apparently being the one who’d spoken to the victim. Shane glanced at him sideways.

Perhaps he was just very good at reading the world. Perhaps he was plagued by the chains of coincidence that led a man to believe he communed with spirits. Perhaps Shane was enabling a mental break. All possible. All plausible. More plausible, to be sure, than the dead calling for aid through the airwaves.

“Look,” Ryan said from across the room, breaking the silence. “If she doesn’t come in the next hour, you should go home and I’ll wait just in case.”

“Sounds good,” Shane said, which was, of course, the exact moment that Ryan’s widow chose to rap on the door.

It was clear at once that she didn’t know her husband was dead. If her husband was, in fact, dead. If she even _had_ a husband. Shane sternly reminded himself to stop falling into trap of Ryan’s wide-eyed certainty.

The woman standing under their lintel was somehow even smaller than Ryan, with skin a slightly darker shade than his and long black hair piled in a soft, old-fashioned sweep atop her head. She was older than both of them. She was wearing a temperance pin on her lapel.

“I’m sorry to bother you gentlemen so late,” she said, wavering in the door. “But I believe you might be able to help me.”

“Your husband sent you,” Ryan said before Shane could stop him, and their visitor’s composure wavered.

“I – well, no,” she said. She looked back down the corridor, presumably for an escape route. “I mean – I was expecting him home … off the _Tiresias_? She’s a repair ship. But I waited at the docks and he never came.”

Ryan looked over significantly at Shane; Shane tried to convey the fact that Ryan was under no circumstances to tell this woman his opinions on her husband’s ghost.

“We knew you’d come,” Ryan said in what he clearly thought of as a reassuring tone. Shane shook his head minutely. He absolutely had not known this.

“Why don’t you take a seat and tell us what’s happened, Mrs. –” Shane temporized, gesturing to his spare chair.

“It’s Miss,” the woman said, sitting cautiously. “And Sophia will do just fine, thank you.”

“Did you get that, Ryan?” Shane said, staring directly at him. No husband. Strike one for ghost radio. He sat down opposite Sophia and tried to angle his chair so Ryan wouldn’t talk to her.

“Your partner,” he began. “He hasn’t come home?”

“Yes. Jack’s a lieutenant in the navy; his ship wasn’t delayed coming back, I could see her in the dock. But he never met me. It’s – not like him.”

Shane dug out one of his many inherited notebooks, drew a line under his notes on Collins, and started writing. “And when was the last time he contacted you?”

“About a month ago, he sent a letter from the base where they were stationed.” 

“Do you have it with you?”

Sophia flinched. “It’s quite personal.”

“Alright,” Shane agreed easily. They didn’t need it, not yet.

“Sophia,” said Ryan, his voice insultingly gentle. “Did you feel –”

“No,” Shane said. “Shut up, Bergara, I’m handling this. Ma’am, I’m so sorry, please continue.”

Sophia looked between them with suspicion. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” she said. “It’s very strange. I felt I should alert someone.”

“And there’s absolutely no reason he might have delayed?” Shane pressed. “With all respect, you’re certain he did, in fact, intend to come home?”

Both Ryan and Sophia glared at him. Shane, recently punched in the teeth, was resistant to glares. If they wanted to be angry with him, they could do so in their own time, when he wasn’t trying to find a missing man.

“No,” Sophia said firmly. “I know what you’re thinking and I also know you’re wrong.”

“Alright,” Shane made a note. He was very rarely wrong in these matters, and he liked to set it down so he had a physical record of him being persistently right. “No enemies that you know of?”

Sophia shook her head. Shane made a note.

“Debts?”

For just a moment, Sophia paused and then Shane knew he had it. He made a note.

“Sophia?” he said. “I’m sure I can help you. But first you’re going to have to tell me everything.”

Outside, the quiet hiss of the rain resuming sounded like a broken radio.

***

The door swung shut behind _Miss_ Sophia Moreno. Shane waited until her footsteps were swallowed by the drumbeat of the rain, and then sighed deeply, tilting his chair back until it had only two feet on the ground.

“We’re going to find him in bed with a call house girl,” he said wearily.

Ryan opened his mouth to protest, but before he could utter a syllable something rolled off one of his many shelves and smashed against the floor. Shane started, all four feet of his chair hitting the ground with a bang. Ryan froze.

“Stop talking,” Ryan said in a low voice. He was holding perfectly still, staring at the empty space behind his desk. Polite society had warned Shane that dabbling in the occult was a mistake and Shane clearly should have listened.

When nothing else happened, Ryan rose with both hands defensively out in front of him, and crept over to the shattered ruin of one of his strange baubles. Green glass had exploded on the floorboards; Shane could see bits of it glinting clear across the room.

“Ryan, it fell.”

“No. Stop. Don’t say anything else that’s going to get us hurt.”

Shane sighed again, but remained silent as Ryan crouched to examine the bed of shards, turning over dangerous-looking splinters. Shane went to fetch the dustpan.

“Her husband,” Ryan said. “Partner, whatever. He’s dead. Don’t talk shit about him.”

“Fine,” Shane said. “But I’m not agreeing that he’s dead without any evidence.”

Ryan looked up, gestured broadly to himself.

“You’re not evidence. We can’t tell this woman her man is dead because you _talked to his ghost_.” 

“We could,” Ryan said sulkily, though he accepted the dustpan and brush when Shane held it out, and started sweeping up the smaller fragments.

“That would be _unthinkably cruel_ , Ryan. We can’t tell her that and then give her nothing. We need a body, a police report. Can’t you at least –” Shane was going to regret asking this, he knew. “I don’t know, can’t you ask the ghost where the body is?”

“ _I tried that_. Obviously, I tried that! I got nothing! It’s dark, it’s cold!”

“So, we have nothing,” Shane said. He wanted to move those pieces of glass Ryan was saving before he severed an artery on them. He wanted to walk away from this.

“Well,” Ryan snapped, “you’re the PI. Let’s go get something, then. Let’s solve this, Detective Madej.”

Shane paused. He was about to undertake a murder investigation with the assistance of a spiritualist and, apparently, the murder victim himself. His client clearly already thought they were mad. And he wasn’t even going to get _paid_.

“Alright, Bergara,” he said. “Let’s solve this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The world is strange and alarming, which of course means it's time for stories! 
> 
> Fun facts (for fans of minutiae)! 
> 
> 1\. Both Shane and Ryan’s offices, as well as the building they are housed in, are based on a real place in the Southern Hemisphere. If you ever visit, you will be treated to a truly remarkable collection of glazed beige tiles. 
> 
> 2\. Vitaphone is a system for recording sound for film, and what those crazy Hollywood types would do next with it was The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie! Coincidentally, this is what sparks the plot of Singin’ in the Rain, another 1927 story, although one in which the characters do seem to be having a better time of things.
> 
> 3\. The Tiresias is a fictional ship, because if I learned anything from the episode of Due South this story takes many of its emotional beats from, it’s that you don’t use a real ship in conjunction with crimes. Most US repair ships were named after mythological or historic figures, and Tiresias is, naturally, the oracle summoned by Odysseus. 
> 
> 4\. Chapter title is taken from the name of an Irving Berlin song! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading - stay safe, hydrated, and moisturized out there!


	2. Torch Song

The bad weather lingered. Flooding in Glendale, cars mired on Eleventh Avenue; the sky like a damp grey blanket thrown over the city, smothering everything underneath. Shane peered out from under a black umbrella and tried not to dwell on what had become of his Thursday afternoon.

He’d met Ryan at the dockyards, as promised, with the hope of uncovering some clear-cut facts. So far, they’d found only rain and fog. Yellow beams from the streetlamps faltered feet away from their posts. The underfoot tangle of harborside ropes and nets and machine tracks was partially hidden from view. Well, it was hidden from Shane’s view. Maybe Ryan could see it, being so much closer to the ground.

Almost completely swallowed by his own umbrella and his coat, Ryan was prowling along the water’s edge, as though hoping a mermaid might spring up and offer him information. Shane followed at a distance, a wary eye on the many dockside doorways. 

“So, our man definitely gets off his ship,” Shane said, looking out into the grey drizzle where San Pedro ought to be. “If he’d gone missing onboard, someone would have reported it.” 

“Maybe it’s a cover-up.”

“Ryan,” Shane said, stopping. “If this is a naval cover-up, we are out. Absolutely not. We go back to our office and pull down the blind, and you can ask the boogiemen if they know where Mrs. J.’s dog has gone.”

Ryan tipped the lip of his umbrella back so he could roll his eyes at Shane. “Alright, he gets off the ship – then he must have been killed immediately after they’d docked, or he would have met Sophia.”

“We don’t know that he’s dead!”

“I do,” Ryan said. “That is a thing that I know.”

“Show me a body,” Shane said. “You find me this man’s corpse and I will agree that he is dead. I will swear to it, even.”

Rain stippled the water. Shane was soon to regret this promise.

***

“Well,” Ryan said an hour later, standing over a half-unrolled tarpaulin. It was wedged between two stacks of lumber and contained one dead man. “Do you believe me now?” Ryan pressed a hand over his mouth and turned away, looking out over the bay, or at least, out over the rain.

“I guess,” Shane said, crouching down. The skin around the dead man’s mouth and eyes was blue. His hair was matted with something dark. His eyes were open, staring unnervingly. On the face of it, Shane had to admit this was probably their missing person, whom Sophia had named as Lieutenant Jack Page.

_Did you break Ryan’s glass circle?_ Shane thought. _Of course you didn’t. This is ridiculous. You certainly are dead, though; I’ll grant you that any day of the week._

Out loud, he said, “We should call the police.”

Ryan nodded, and there followed a brief but impassioned debate about who should go and look for a phone and who should stay with the body. It ended with Ryan threatening to throw up on a crime scene, and Shane leaning awkwardly against a stack of wooden beams, peering down at a corpse.

“I’m not happy you’re here,” he said to it. “I mean, probably not as unhappy as you are. But now my – now Ryan is going to think he can talk to ghosts, when what is actually happening is that he has an undiagnosed brain lesion, and it’s really going to damage the atmosphere of my office.”

Jack said nothing. Rain was collecting in the corners of his eyes.

“I mean, it’s not that I hold it against him. He’s fine. He’s great. I don’t mind sharing an office with a spiritualist. He’s just wrong.”

Rain had turned the stacks of unvarnished wood dark. Shane felt like he was in a very miserable, very deconstructed forest. Jack said nothing.

“And look, I don’t need to be right all the time. If I did, I would have become a cop, not a PI. But we’re working together on this, and it’s hard enough explaining that I’m at a scene because some pissed-off relative has hired me, forget about receiving instructions from behind the veil.”

Jack, evidently very firmly behind that same veil now, said nothing.

“I just don’t think I can be friends with someone who is this wildly incorrect all the time,” Shane said, knocking a boot against the wood. “Or, I mean, I can, but it’s very irritating. And you’re not helping.”

It was still cold and wet enough that flies hadn’t started to gather around Jack, who said nothing.

“Sorry, that was insensitive. I’m very sorry you’re dead. It’s bad for both of us, but probably mostly for you.”

Unseen across the harbor, the Angels Gate lighthouse moaned out its warning. Shane thought about folding down a corner of the tarp to cover Jack’s face, but decided he probably shouldn’t disturb the evidence more than he already had.

The sun was just beginning to dip when Ryan returned, bringing with him the city’s finest. Or at least, the police. Though, it might have been more accurate to say that they had brought Ryan with them: he clambered out of the back of the car, looking unhappy.

“Okay?” Ryan asked softly, as Shane went to meet him and they both shuffled away from the cops.

“Well, nothing about the situation has changed.”

“They insisted I wait for them,” Ryan said.

“They probably knew your keen occultist senses could guide them through the rain,” Shane said. “Very much like the lighthouse, your highly attuned vision cuts through the fog of this earthly world.”

Ryan elbowed him. “Screw you,” he said calmly. In between the piles of lumber, two officers were awkwardly hauling Jack out of the crevice he’d been shoved into. One finally grabbed his ankles and heaved until the unyielding body skidded heavily onto the open dock. Ryan winced and glanced away. Shane watched him with interest.

“You’re really squeamish about this,” he remarked lightly. “Don’t you make a living off, you know, _dead people_?”

“ _Spirits_ ,” Ryan hissed, “not bodies, which are completely different and shouldn’t be treated like sacks of flour, what’s wrong with you? This is how you get haunted! This is how things go wrong!”

“Oh, do tell.”

A cop was now doing something with Jack’s hands, and Shane no longer wanted to watch. He supposed that didn’t speak well of his career as an investigator of crime, but he wasn’t the only so-called professional on this dock averting their eyes.

“Spirits stay because they have unfinished business,” Ryan said, “and if they’re here too long, I think they get unhappy, and the unhappier they are, the more violent they get.”

That made sense. The longer Shane spent chasing loose ends, the unhappier he became. He even suspected he could be moved to violence if he was kept on this dock much longer.

“So, what you’re telling me is that you evict ghosts for a living,” Shane said. “You’re a shitty landlord, but for the mortal coil. _Pay up, or get out_!”

“I’m not going to talk to you anymore,” Ryan said. Shane tried to hide his grin. They both turned back to the police investigation, which was now going through Jack’s pockets.

The edges of the sky were starting to tinge pink, like blood dropped into a glass of water. They watched and waited as cops took samples from the dead man’s skin; as a worried looking man in civilian clothes photographed the area; as a hearse rolled up; and as the body was bagged and trundled away. 

Finally, with shadows crawling down to the water, an officer strolled over and instructed them not to leave town, and then the whole parade slowly moved off into the gathering dark.

“We should tell Sophia,” Ryan said. The lighthouse groaned again. Somehow, the scene seemed worse _without_ a corpse in it.

“I don’t want to tell her,” Shane admitted. He’d told a lot of people that their spouses were cheating on them, or that their children had deserted, or that their gold had been melted down, but this was another kettle of fish entirely. It was a kettle of fish he had no interest in accepting.

“She came to us for help,” Ryan said.

“We should let the police tell her. At least let them go first. They’ve got training. Hell, they’ve got the _body_.”

Ryan gave him a deeply skeptical look. “So, what – we just walk away?”

Shane sighed. “No, we should talk to her. But not now. We should at least have something to tell her.”

“We do,” Ryan said, pointedly.

“Something concrete. Something that isn’t ‘your husband’s ghost thinks he was murdered’.”

“Okay, first of all he was definitely murdered, unless you think he fell into that tarpaulin by accident.” Shane shrugged non-committally. Ryan continued as though he hadn’t. “And secondly, she came to _both_ of us. She had to be at least a little bit expecting – well, me.”

“Ryan,” Shane said seriously, ignoring the idea that anyone could expect Ryan. “If _my_ husband – sweetheart – partner had just died, the _last_ thing I’d want would be you on my doorstep telling me you could speak to them through the radio.”

Ryan’s expression went from bemused to incredibly injured. “Fine,” he muttered. “Fine. But if it were _me,_ I’d want to know my – whatever – was still trying to speak to me. And that someone was listening.”

It was a terrible thought. Loving someone so much you just kept on calling for them until your body rotted away. Unheard, screaming uselessly into six feet of dirt. It made Shane’s throat itch. It made him incredibly sad.

“This has been,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “a remarkably unpleasant day. Present company aside.”

“Every day I have to talk to murder victims is an unpleasant day,” Ryan said, and when Shane looked at him questioningly, he added, “What, you think I wouldn’t prefer the supernatural ability to find oil wells? Natural talent sucks, man.”

Shane laughed. “Fair enough.” Then he hesitated – they did work together, and they had just spent all afternoon on the docks because Ryan said he could hear the dead and Shane had listened to him, so he was pretty sure this wouldn’t go sideways, but it still merited caution. He cleared his throat and asked, “You wanna get a drink?”

** 

Broadly speaking, Shane approved of the general aims and themes of the Temperance Movement. He agreed it would be nice if more men were at home with their families, and if those same men couldn’t edge their tempers with alcohol, or have their purses emptied by unscrupulous barmen. He was a big supporter of public order, peaceful cities, and citizens not permanently disfigured by tainted spirits.

However, he also hunted petty criminals through the streets for a living, and so sometimes he needed a gin drink to cope with his life. Thankfully, despite Prohibition’s best efforts, a gin drink was not something hard to come by in the City of Angels.

The Jenever Club wasn’t one of the better-known holes and its décor felt a little like being trapped inside a paper lantern, but it was clean and quiet and shoes didn’t stick to its floor. More importantly, Shane had once done its owner a favor, and so he and Ryan were allowed in. 

Broadly speaking, Shane had no problem with the Temperance Movement – but he privately thought that if any of its campaigners could see Ryan lit up like the commonwealth after barely two drinks, they might change their minds about the evil of liquor.

Ryan’s eyes had gone soft and heavy lidded, his frenetic energy mellowed into something tamer. The Jenever’s dozen red sconce lights were casting a warm glow over his flushed skin, turning him ethereal and golden. Shane could feel his own keen detective’s mind recognizing the dots of something important, like points of light dancing on the surface of a drink, but his gin-soaked frontal lobe wasn’t quite up to the task of connecting them.

“No, listen,” Ryan was saying, had been saying for a good minute. It was a sparse night and the low hum of conversation barely covered their voices. “It is, it really is and the fact that you don’t believe me demonstrates how – how little you believe me.”

Ryan swayed, pitched forwards, and grabbed Shane’s arm to steady himself. Light glinted off the strange spiral charm he wore around his neck.

“Right, Ryan,” Shane said, carefully righting him. “Our building is haunted. Of course it is. This is why rent went up. The ghost was too good a bonus to ignore.”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “It’s extra for ghosts, obviously.”

“Is that how you charge people? Extra for ghosts?”

“How dare you,” Ryan said, and took a messy sip of his drink. The mix of soda and lime certainly wasn’t the best thing Shane had ever tasted, but it hid the sharp edge of whatever rusted tub the gin had been brewed in, and you couldn’t deny that it was getting results. Ryan put his glass down very carefully, finally taking his hand off Shane’s arm as he did so. “I’m just fucking with you,” he confided. “The building’s fine.”

Shane made a soft noise of outrage. “You see! This – this is why I don’t believe you! You are the boy who cried ghost.”

Ryan smiled benignly. In the hazy light of the bar, Shane could understand how someone might mistake him for a conduit to another world. It would be so easy to be taken in by Ryan’s sure voice and gentle expression, so easy to be enchanted by the lie of it.

“It’s not my fault your dull, earthly senses are easy to trick,” Ryan said, breaking the spell. “The ghost in our office thinks so too.”

“Oh, fuck off, Bergara,” Shane said happily, and raised a hand to summon another drink. Something in Ryan’s smug grin seemed to pair well with gin that had been made in a sink.

“You know,” said a voice from behind the bar, “you can absolutely smack him if he talks to you like that.”

Then, standing before them, was the Jenever’s owner, Kelsey. Her river of blonde hair was tucked up beneath a flat cap and she was under-dressed in slacks and suspenders. Shane had once saved her from a very determined building inspector who couldn’t countenance an un-mapped tunnel and they’d been friendly acquaintances ever since.

“Sorry, are we stopping you on your way to deliver a paper, Impicciche?” Shane said, and she immediately flicked him with the towel slung over her shoulder.

“Oh, I like her,” Ryan said softly. Shane had the sudden desire to lean in between them before this escalated and he was left outnumbered.

“She’s fine,” he said grudgingly, pushing his glass across the bar. Kelsey poured the gin like she owned it, which she did, and the lime juice like she knew how bad the gin tasted, which she also did.

“So, you’ve finally decided to take on a partner,” she said. Kelsey was a big supporter of being surrounded by people. It was part of the reason she needed so many unmarked tunnels.

“No,” said Shane. “Absolutely not. This is Ryan Bergara, he believes in spirits.”

Kelsey raised her bottle, smiling. “Well, I’ll drink to that.”

Shane had a split-second in which to regret the choices that had brought him to this moment in time, before Ryan started laughing so hard there was a real risk he’d choke.

“Go away now,” Shane hissed to Kelsey. “Go and break the law somewhere else.”

“Oh, I forgot you’re a lawman,” she said, not moving. A few customers glanced over, saw she was talking about Shane, and immediately disregarded the threat. “I should probably stop letting you into my hive of degeneracy.”

“We’re investigating a murder,” Ryan said.

Kelsey’s smile flickered. “Maybe not in here, you’re not?”

Shane changed the subject. “Kelsey, where is everyone? Were the nice ladies at the Anti-Saloon League right, are you poisoning people?” His voice was light, but through the film of alcohol he could tell that Kelsey was worried.

“For a detective, you’re really not very observant,” she said. “It’s this trial.”

Of course. The papers had been full of it. The man was a local enforcer; the trial was drawing to a conclusion without having been mysteriously aborted, or hamstrung by the untimely death of a prosecutor. By this point, the only people more nervous than the witnesses would be other criminals in the same web, feeling the silk tremble as the spider closed in. The bulk of Kelsey’s customers, in other words.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what gets said,” she continued quietly, “and everyone’s staying low to the ground until then.”

This was exactly the sort of thing Shane tried to avoid. He looked down into his drink, just as Ryan said, “If you’d like a clearer picture, I could read for you?”

Shane’s head snapped back up to find Kelsey grinning. “Oh let’s,” she laughed. “I’d love some good news from the beyond.”

Shane couldn’t decide which one of them he wanted to stop more, and so he did nothing.

“I make no promises,” Ryan said, and almost fell sideways off his chair. Shane grabbed his arm and held him steady while Ryan retrieved his deck and fanned the cards out towards Kelsey. She selected one from the middle of the sweep and unhesitatingly turned over the image of a man dangling from one ankle, hands crossed behind his head.

“Well that doesn’t look … great,” she said.

“No, no, it’s alright,” Ryan quickly reassured. “The Hanged Man. Things are in suspension now, but they’ll be resolved, and then they’ll get better.”

Shane raised an eyebrow, but no one was looking at him, so his skepticism went unnoticed.

“Good enough,” Kelsey said, and topped up Ryan’s drink. “I like him,” she added to Shane. “He’s welcome to come back.” 

Before Shane could answer, she smiled at them with the force of a flashbulb going off, and then turned to slip through a door in the wall behind her, probably to go and stir a vat with a stick, or illegally import some juniper. 

Ryan watched her go, before fixing his slightly blurred gaze on Shane. He was shuffling his cards slowly. “Your turn,” he said.

“Oh no.” Shane immediately smacked Ryan’s hand down, pinning both it and the card it had just drawn to the counter. Shane could see the blue-and-black check of the cardback peeping through Ryan’s fingers. “No, nope, no thank you,” he said. “Not today.”

He was perfectly content with this moment, the soft lights and faint buzz. He had no desire to see it dissected, to hear about its past or its future. It was enough to be sitting here, now. Ryan looked unreasonably put out by this.

Slightly off-balance, with his cards spread before him and light netted in his eyelashes, Ryan really did give off the altered air of a Delphic oracle, even with all his clothes on. Maybe the sign he’d hung on their door had some truth to it.

The gears of Shane’s mind stuck for a moment, jammed by a thought he hadn’t been able to fully see before it disappeared into the machinery: another dot, maybe. He swallowed a mouthful of gin, hoping to drown whatever idea his mind was struggling to construct. He’d had enough thoughts for the day. That was the whole point of being here.

In the corner of the room, a man sat down to the Jenever’s clunky old piano and started to pick out a poor-sounding tune.

“I thought you did believe me,” Ryan said suddenly, his voice uneven at the edges. “I mean, obviously you didn’t, but I thought maybe you sort of did a little bit, and that’s why you agreed to moving in together.”

Shane noticed that his hand was still over Ryan’s. He felt his brain grinding unhappily. The pianist brought in a second hand, markedly worse than the first.

“Ryan –”

“But really, the only people who _do_ believe me want something from me. So why did you say yes? You can’t like the building that much.” 

Shane considered ducking the question (he absolutely did like the building that much, it was a great building, it even had ghosts); he considered being truthful (three quarters of his income was based on people mistaking him for another man); and ended up being honest.

“I liked you,” he said, shrugging. “I liked talking to you in the hall, and I like sharing an office with you. I even like working this case with you, despite the fact you still claim your real partner is a non-verbal ghost.” 

Across the room, someone stood up in front of a light, presumably so they could go and strangle the man on the piano. A wave of shadows went flickering across Ryan’s face.

“I like working with you too,” he said, breaking into a slow, tipsy grin, “even though you keep discarding half our evidence.”

“Unbelievable,” Shane said, smiling back. “Get out of my sight.”

He kept his hand pressed over Ryan’s.

**

Shane didn’t run with these people, but he’d done enough harmless favors and ignored enough minor crimes to be enmeshed in the web – even if he was at its very extremities. So, he only saw four other people discreetly rise and exit before the tap on the shoulder came.

“You’d better get your friend out of here,” said a voice in his ear, though in kindness rather than threat. “Unless you think he’d like prison.”

Shane nodded once, danger clearing his mind. It wouldn’t exactly be the first time he’d been caught up in a raid, and Kelsey made sure that any incursion on her property was mostly for show, but he still didn’t want to put Ryan through that.

“Come on,” he said quietly, disentangling their hands and sliding Ryan’s card into his own jacket pocket. He put a hand under Ryan’s elbow and jostled him up. “Time to go.”

Ryan’s eyes flicked around wildly. “Cops?” he asked.

“For the second time today, even,” Shane answered, calmly and efficiently herding Ryan towards one of the many doors. “I wonder if they’d be willing to call the whole thing even?”

Around them, a very orderly evacuation of favored clientele was taking place, but Shane knew that soon the clarion would be sounded and it would be a free-for-all.

He unlatched a door almost entirely hidden by grime, gently shoved Ryan through it, and then stepped out himself into an empty concrete hallway. One of the famous unmapped tunnels. Cold, stale air enveloped them, smacking Shane sober.

“Right,” he said, trying to remember in which direction the next door was. “Let’s keep moving.” He grabbed Ryan’s arm again.

“Does this happen to you a lot?” Ryan asked, as he was tugged down the dark corridor.

“Oh, constantly,” Shane answered, spotting a staircase up ahead. “I am a man of danger.”

Ryan scoffed and Shane put him ahead on what was more a glorified fire-escape than a stairway. This way, Shane could catch him if he fell backwards, or delay a pursuer if one appeared. Without the stupefying effect of gin, of warm, close air, and dim lights, Shane could tell his brain was working on those dots again, the gears starting to turn, the picture becoming increasingly clear. He’d probably be able to put off the full revelation until they were at least back on the street.

At the top of the stairs, there was another door which opened onto another corridor. This one seemed to be hidden in a wall and finally led out to the natural habitat of private investigators everywhere: a scummy back alley, with bad lighting and worse ideas. In the distance, Shane could hear sirens.

“Jesus,” Ryan muttered, leaning against the wall and putting a hand over his heart. His coat had been abandoned over a chair as they’d left, and he looked rumpled. “Well, that was fun.”

“Don’t say I never take you anywhere,” said Shane, straightening out his seams. “We probably shouldn’t be standing _right by the exit_ when the cops clear the place out.” 

“Yeah,” Ryan said and didn’t move. Absently, he tugged at his shirt-cuff, his eyes dark and thoughtful.

“Come on,” Shane said, before he did something he’d regret, like ask Ryan to use his second sense to check for Prohibition agents.

The alley ran into a boulevard still busy with evening traffic. On the pavement, people leaving early dinners blocked the path of those heading out late, all of them bathed in the red haze of passing taillights. The whole night felt like the inside of a kaleidoscope, brilliant and alive.

Shane knew Ryan lived too far out to walk home, especially when he was this unsteady. And though the city might be used to turning a blind eye, he also didn’t feel quite easy about putting Ryan in a cab when Ryan was so obviously up to his eye-teeth in illegal liquor. 

“Let’s just –” Shane said, maneuvering until they were standing in front of a shuttered shopfront. “Let’s just stand here and sober up a bit.”

He dipped a hand into his pocket, fishing for a cigarette, and found the packet rattling ominously. Ryan tipped his head back to stare up at the grimy awning above them while Shane lit a match. The brief flare of it caught the line of Ryan’s throat. A gear in Shane’s head laboriously thumped over a notch.

“Here.” Shane sucked in a welcome lungful of smoke and held the cigarette out to Ryan, who proved at least more adept at this than he was at drinking.

“Can you really afford to be smoking these?” Ryan said after a moment. “You lose any weight and you’ll actually disappear. You’re practically one dimensional already. If we turned you on your side, you’d just be a line.”

“Give it back, then,” Shane laughed. His hand knocked against Ryan’s, warm skin in the cool February night. 

For a while, they stayed huddled there, passing Shane’s last cigarette between them. Occasionally, a single sheet of rain tore off from the heavy clouds and sounded on the awning. It was, Shane thought, as close as LA ever came to being beautiful.

But the double-tap of nicotine and fresh air were doing their work, and the cold reality of being out on the stoop was becoming hard to ignore.

“Alright,” said Shane, only a little regretfully. “Let’s get you home.”

The raid had come early in the night, and it was still easy to flag down a cab. It was much harder to ignore the heat of Ryan’s skin beneath the thin fabric of his shirt as Shane handed him in and shut the door on his mild protest of, “No, wait, where are you going?”. Something in Shane’s mind thunked worryingly.

As he watched the cab merge into the ouroboros of downtown traffic, Shane finally let his brain start to connect the dots it had been collecting all night. All week, if he was being honest. And now, without distractions, alone on the sidewalk, it seemed he was being very honest indeed.

He thought about how easy it had been to combine offices with Ryan and joined that to how easy it was to work with him, despite Ryan being, on paper, the very worst kind of person. How Ryan had looked, painted red and gold and warm in the Jenever’s lights, joined to how Shane’s heart had sunk when Ryan had smiled secretively at Kelsey, joined to Ryan telling him not to get skeptical energy on the cards. He thought about the fact that he was currently walking home because he’d given the last of his ready cash to Ryan’s cab driver.

Then, halfway down the boulevard, he let his mind step back and look at the picture it had made.

“Well,” said Shane. “Fuck.”

**

So maybe he was interested in kissing Ryan Bergara. It was nothing Shane couldn’t handle. He’d fallen for the wrong people in the past and he’d survive to do it again in the future.

“Inspiring,” he said to his own wan reflection as he examined it the next morning. “The words of a champion.”

He was out of practice with drinking and his head ached. He’d walked all the way home, mulling over his new predicament, so his legs ached as well. In the mirror, he looked disreputable and, there was no getting around it, quite sad. Finally figuring out what was going on in his own mind had meant about a half-mile of wishful thinking and then a further two miles of knowing _exactly_ what it was he couldn’t have. A lesser man might have fled the situation, but Shane was made of sterner stuff, and also he was the owner of a desk that literally couldn’t be moved out of his shared office.

“All right, Madej,” he said firmly to himself, slapping his cheek. “Time to go to work and not make it weird.”

He repeated the mantra to himself all morning: turning over the words as he shaved and dressed, as he stepped onto the streetcar, as he rode the clattering elevator up to the sixth floor, and once more as he opened the office door and stepped inside.

It was weird. At least it wasn’t because of Shane.

Ryan had gotten in ahead of him – or at least, Shane assumed the shape slumped over Ryan’s desk and obscured by one of Ryan’s gauzy tablecloths was Ryan. The edges of the covering jingled delicately as the shape breathed, so whoever it was was alive, at least.

Shane carefully set his umbrella down and latched the door, trying to be silent about it.

“I wish I were dead,” the lump said. “The Temperance ladies were right. Alcohol is a sin.”

“I admit it may not have been the best idea,” Shane conceded, hanging up his coat and his hat. “Why did you come in if you can’t sit up?”

“Thought you should know I hadn’t passed on,” said the lump, which, on the evidence, Shane did have to assume was Ryan. “Although I now regret that decision.”

“Well, I appreciate the gesture. I’m very pleased you’re not dead. It was _three drinks_ , Ryan.”

Shane surveyed him for a moment, trying to map out where Ryan’s head might be under all that fake-jet fringing. Trying to map out the topography of his own confused emotions. He still wanted to kiss Ryan. This was worrying, because all he could currently see of the man was one elbow poking out from the pile of chintz.

“Stay here a minute,” Shane said.

“I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”

Leaving Ryan to his misery, Shane ducked back into the corridor and walked two doors down to one of the better kept premises, with a red shade pulled low in its windowpane. He tried to remember the name of the woman who rented here, failed, and knocked anyway.

They weren’t the only ones in early. The room’s proprietor, draped in a silk dressing gown that was tied with a bow larger than Shane’s head, opened the door. She stared at him for a moment, taking in the fading yellow bruise on his jaw, the shirt he’d misbuttoned and was yet to fix, the mud on his shoes. Her black hair peeked out from a turban, and her expression was sharp.

“You don’t have an appointment,” she said. Her tone made it clear that he wouldn’t have one in future, either.

“Oh no. No, I live here,” Shane said. “I mean, I work here too, across the hall?” He gestured helplessly back towards his own door.

“Oh,” the woman said, her face clearing. “Yes, you’re the one who does séances.”

“I really don’t –” Shane started, but he was cut off.

“If this is about rent, then no, I’m not interested in forming a tenants union. Velasquez already asked.”

“Really?” Shane said, momentarily distracted from his goal. “No one asked me.”

“Well, that’s because you sell information from the other side, hon,” the woman said. In a flash, Shane remembered her name: Stella. “People think it’s hinky.”

“Right,” Shane said. “Look, putting aside the ghosts for a moment, I have a favor to ask you. As a neighbor. As a neighbor who you’re definitely not in a union with.” Stella narrowed her eyes. Shane quickly pressed on. “I know you’ve wired for hot water, and we’re not, and I will pay anything you want for a cup of coffee.”

She barked a sudden laugh. “Is _that_ all? The last guy asked me to hide letters for him. Men.”

“Men,” Shane agreed. “We are the worst.”

“I’ll stand you a cup,” she said. “But only because I feel sorry that you’ve never found a real profession.”

“That’s fair,” said Shane. Stella shut the door on him, then reappeared a moment later with a chipped white mug of dark, lethal-looking coffee.

“You’re lucky I already had the kettle on,” she said, carefully handing him the cup so neither of them burned their fingers. “Make sure you bring that back.”

“You’re an angel,” Shane said. “The cat’s pajamas. The bee’s knees.”

“Alright, you can get lost now,” Stella said, closing the door on his platitudes, and leaving Shane alone in the corridor with his prize. He thought that maybe if Ryan hadn’t gotten there first, he could have happily nurtured a crush on this woman.

But it was Ryan, still pathetically curled up on his desk, that Shane had fallen in with, and he was just going to have to live with the consequences of that decision. Carefully, he set the cup down next to where he’d determined Ryan’s head to be.

“If you emerge from your winding sheet, there’s coffee here for you. I hear it’s good for the head.”

Ryan unwrapped himself. He looked much worse than Shane did, pale and fragile, with bruise-like shadows under his eyes.

“Holy shit,” he said, reaching for the mug and pulling it into what was very nearly an embrace.

“Would you and the coffee like to be alone?” Shane said, and Ryan didn’t even bother to look up as he flipped Shane off. Satisfied he’d done what he could to save a life, Shane then retreated back to his desk.

The day ran smoothly enough from there. Shane spent his time going over Tinsley’s old notes, looking for anything that might help him in the investigation of an unexpected corpse. As always, he found little he could parse, just snippets of interviews and strings of locations and, most concerningly, what looked like a smear of dried blood.

Just before lunch, he had a pre-arranged meeting with Mrs. Collins, which would have been a bad enough appointment without Ryan still huddled in the corner, the beaded cloth once again over his head.

“I’ve taken on a partner,” Shane said firmly as she glanced over. “He’s still learning the ropes, don’t mind him.”

Then he had to tell her that her husband had another woman, and that it looked serious. She didn’t weep as Shane detailed his findings, handed over his case notes, and advised her to find a good divorce lawyer and to call him up for evidence if needed. Dry-eyed, she gathered her things and spared one last look at Ryan before exiting.

“You handled that well,” Ryan said, rolling back the edge of his funerary scarf.

“Well, it’s my job,” Shane said. “The petty and the sordid.”

“You should put that on the door,” Ryan said. “Shane Madej, special investigator for the petty and sordid.”

Shane laughed. A fortnight ago, it wouldn’t have been funny, but he’d been moving fast lately, and the creeping mold of LA was starting to burn off his skin.

“Who do you think killed Jack?” Ryan asked, leaning his cheek against his desk.

“Probably a shipmate he owned money, or a jealous husband,” Shane said. Ryan made a displeased noise. “That’s almost always what it is, Ryan. I don’t know how things are done on your side of the room –”

“ _On my side of the room_ ,” Ryan parroted under his breath.

“– but over here, it is _always_ something incredibly, well, petty. Sorry.”

Finally, Ryan threw back his shroud and sat up fully. He still looked wan, but no longer in immediate danger of stumbling off the mortal coil. Shane still wanted to kiss him.

Ryan stared over critically for a moment, and then – so fast it seemed he was trying to surprise the cards themselves – snatched a card from his deck and slammed it down on the table. Shane was too far away to see the image, but he could see Ryan’s face fall, and he didn’t appreciate the way that made his own chest tighten.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Ryan said softly, but with great feeling. Shane wholeheartedly agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Ryan, coming of age during Prohibition, unable to fulfill his frat boy drinking destiny.
> 
> More fun facts! 
> 
> 1\. Jenever is a Dutch juniper liquor, and it sounds like it a character from The Witcher, so what more could you want from a speakeasy?  
> 2\. Lucky Strike cigarettes really did advertise themselves as slimming during the 20s, I guess because they hadn’t filled their societal evil quota that week or something.  
> 3\. Chapter title is, again, from Mr. Irving Berlin. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who read and commented and kudosed! It’s just you and my daily government-approved walk against the lockdown over here. I hope you’re all keeping well and safe and washing your hands like little raccoons.


	3. Don't Take Your Beau to the Seashore

“Bullshit, you believe that,” Ryan said, throwing the paper down on the desk.

It had been a good week, before this. Shane had certified an insurance claim and informed two very upright parents that their daughter had absconded to the continent, accompanied by a man who was almost certainly her lawful husband by now. He’d begged Mrs. J. to let him make up missing posters for Pinky the Pomeranian if she’d only agree that the dog had _run away_. He’d kept his newfound desire to kiss Ryan to a low background hum.

Then the Wednesday early edition had declared the demise of Jack Page a death by misadventure. The news was sandwiched in between a court report from San Quentin, where the mobster whose arrest was causing Kelsey such trouble had just been transferred, and a notice for the auction of forfeited goods.

“It does seem unlikely,” Shane agreed grudgingly.

“He was wrapped in a tarp!” Ryan continued. “He was hidden behind a pile of wood! He had a major contusion to the back of his head!”

Shane was starting to regret letting Ryan read the autopsy report. He, Shane, still knew nothing about how to summon spirits, and yet here was Ryan arguing the finer points of forensic pathology, as though _he’d_ been the one to bribe the mortician. It wasn’t a two-way street, was all.

“What do you want to do about – this?” Shane asked, already dreading the answer.

“Uh, go and see Sophia,” Ryan said immediately. “Offer her our help. Do what the cops won’t.”

Shane had to give Ryan credit for how quickly he’d figured out the folly of relying on their local law enforcement. Though perhaps, Shane realized, watching Ryan pace around the room, he’d always had good reason to understand that police had prices, and those prices were alarmingly low.

“No word from your … contact, then?” Shane asked. “It would be really useful if he could just wind back his memories a bit and whisper about who he might have seen coming towards him with a two-by-four.”

Ryan shot him a dirty look.

“Right,” Shane said. “Sophia is it.”

***

For once, Ryan turned out to be right. The instant the Moreno door opened, Shane was hit by understanding like a thunderclap. It was all he could to do not to immediately blurt, _oh, so you did it_.

“Yes?” asked the man who had opened the door. He was the color of new milk. He looked very wary. Shane wondered if he was the husband or the lover.

“I’m Shane Madej, and this is my – associate, Ryan Bergara,” Shane said, unable to keep a sardonic lilt out of his voice. “We’re here to see Sophia Moreno? She recently engaged our services in relation to a missing man.” Shane stared at him very deliberately, and was gratified to see the other man flinch. _Got you,_ he thought.

The man unlatched the door and opened it wide enough to shake their hands. “Etienne,” he said, by way of introduction, and led them into the house.

It was a perfectly normal one-bedroom, kept with a vengeance and the sort of pride not usually found in the monied overclass. Sophia rose to greet them in the living room, her composure uncracked. She didn’t seem worried about what they might say in front of this new man. Shane wondered if he should throw his net of suspicion wider.

“I’m sorry,” said Ryan, before anyone else could speak. With a bolt of dread, Shane realized they hadn’t had the ‘do not talk to the bereaved woman about her husband’s ghost’ chat on the way over. He tried to glare at Ryan, but the Mystic Oracle was already busy being plied with coffee.

“Obviously, we have some doubts about the police findings,” Shane said once they were all settled. He was still standing; the new man was perched on the edge of Sophia’s armchair, a hand on her shoulder. “And we’d like to continue looking at the case, with your blessing.”

Sophia nodded stiffly. “Yes,” she said. “I think that would be helpful, for us.” Her eyes flicked to Ryan, who also nodded, and then up to Etienne, who looked grieved. No one attempted to explain to Shane what was going on.

As usual, he was going to have to get the explanation himself. “I’d also like to go over a few more questions with you,” Shane said, and drew out his notebook.

Sophia and Etienne were surprisingly willing to talk, and it was surprisingly easy for Shane to adapt usual line of inquiry to murder. _Can you think of anyone with ill intent towards your priceless brooch/your small dog/ Jack? Who would have had access to it/ them/ him? And when was the last time you saw the diamond / Pinky / your dead partner?_ Crime, it turned out, operated along much the same lines no matter its scale.

What Shane couldn’t figure out, and was struggling to find a polite way to work into conversation, was how, exactly, these people were involved with each other. Or, more precisely, why no one was making excuses for what was obviously an affair, at one of its ends. Shane frowned at his clients as they offered answers in tandem and could not quite put his finger on it.

It came down, finally, to the letter Sophia had told them about that first day. The one which was personal. Murder had evidently shaken her sense of propriety, because she sent Etienne away to fetch it. Shane followed, thinking it might be helpful to split them up and wanting to pry into the rest of the home.

They left Sophia and Ryan speaking softly in Spanish behind them – well, Sophia speaking, Ryan struggling. Shane glanced back a second longer than necessary: this grief-soaked house threw Ryan into sharp relief, immediate and fleeting. Shane wanted to grab him and run.

Etienne took him back down the hall, to a long console table. It held a dish of keys and a line of trinkets. There were two identical wooden boxes with brightly polished brass clasps and a series of framed photos. Etienne opened one of the boxes and began rifling through.

“I can’t believe we all got through the war only for this,” he said softly. “You would have been too young, I think. But I thought we were out of it, I really did.”

Shane had been just young enough to draft-dodge, and his father had been essential industries. But he had uncles and cousins who had shipped out, who had come back grim and disturbed, like shallow graves. He looked at the photos while Etienne searched. All of them were some combination of the three – Sophia, Jack, Etienne. One of the men in uniform, their faces held stiff and dour. It was the first time Shane had been Jack alive.

“Handsome devil, wasn’t he?” Etienne said, seeing what had caught Shane’s attention. “I always told him he’d break hearts. He said I was full of stuff. Look where it got us. Here it is.”

He’d found the letter in question, and held it gingerly. A foreign postmark, an address in the careful hand of a man who was used to mail getting lost.

“Thank you,” Shane said, turning the envelope in his hands. 

“Before we go back in –” Etienne said. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of Sophie, but you found him, didn’t you? The police said it was an anonymous tip.”

Shane nodded. He hated the direction this was going in.

“And it looked violent?”

“Yes,” Shane said. “Yes, it did.”

Carefully, he slid the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it. He’d take whatever notes he needed here – he had no interest in assuming custody of anyone’s last correspondence.

Jack had been a military man, and had clearly never shaken the habit of writing around a censor. He wrote that he missed ‘dearest Sophie’ and hoped to soon be returned to her arms. He wrote that the hours away from her were like torture, one day soon they’d run away out west. All the traditional lines of tenderness and promise, to which Shane was normally immune, were today tugging at him horrifically. He skimmed along, forcing his expression into one of disinterest.

And then, a curious postscript: Jack knew, he wrote, that things had been hard. But they were going to get better. He had a plan; he had found a way to take care of them. He would change everything. He would, he wrote, _fix it_.

Shane glanced up at Etienne, whose face revealed nothing but sorrow, then carefully folded the paper back into thirds and returned it to the box. In the middle of the table, a gilt-edged frame held a photo ruined by laughter: faced blurred, hands caught in the ghostly motion of flying up to mouths.

_I will fix it._ This changed things.

***

The floor of the streetcar rattled away happily beneath their feet as it hurtled out of the neighborhood and towards LA proper. Shane had gotten over his initial dismay at how comprehensively he’d failed to read this case, but now the bare facts of the matter had left him feeling – well, sad, mostly. This was why he stuck to estate squabbles. This, and his longstanding rule about not getting mixed up in more than he could handle.

He glanced sideways at Ryan, who looked pensive with one elbow propped against the window. Miraculously, he’d agreed with Shane and accepted that Jack had definitely gotten himself into trouble. _I will fix_ this were famous last words. They precluded insurance scams, preventable deaths, and bad funerals. They were the words of men who robbed banks, committed fraud, kidnapped their own children, went to war.

At Slauson, Shane nudged Ryan in the ribs and they changed onto a red car headed back towards the docks.

“Thought of something?” Ryan asked quietly, but Shane just shook his head as they stepped into the thick wreath of smoke at the back of the car. He didn’t have a plan or a theory, just the primal instinct of private eyes everywhere: the desire to see a crime scene with fresh eyes.

The car emptied out, then finally disgorged them at its final stop. It was only just afternoon and the wharves were teeming, filled end to end with shouts and thuds and the faint cooked tuna smell of the canneries. Off-duty sailors in civvies laughed and argued in clumps on the docks. Away in the distance, the temporary lumber yards of the Hammond Company loomed.

Shane shoved his hands in his pockets and headed down towards the water. Probably their crime scene had been entirely dismantled by now, either hoisted onto a ship and sent away to parts unknown or lugged onto the railway and sped upstate. Soon, someone would admiringly pat the walls of their new living room and never know that a dead man’s head had rested next to that very board.

“Ryan, I don’t like this,” Shane said at length. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say I hate this.”

“I know. I’m not exactly having the time of my life either,” Ryan said, coming to stand next to him.

Shane snorted mirthlessly. “Why would anyone kill him? What did he _do_?” 

“We don’t actually know he did anything,” Ryan argued. “Maybe he just had a plan that went wrong. Or money somewhere. Something valuable.”

Shane glanced over at Ryan, still so sure there was nothing rotten beneath the surface of this case. The salt-breeze was playing with his hair.

“Something worth killing him over?” Shane said.

“Maybe someone just meant to knock him around, and it went too far.”

“Jesus,” Shane said. Distantly, he was aware of a shift-change, workers swapping out, the navy men starting to disperse. “I really wish you hadn’t talked to this guy, Ryan. You’ve gotta start being more careful about your calls.”

“How many times –” Ryan started, but Shane cut him off.

“Did you tell her? That you think you’ve been –”

“Really?” Ryan said. “We’re really still at ‘so you think you’ve been’?”

“Fine. Did you tell Sophia that while she may think she hired us to track down a wayward sweetheart, she was in fact influenced by the ghostly presence of a dead man to engage our services. That’s probably a violation of consumer law, now that I think about it.”

“I didn’t tell her anything,” Ryan said, frustration lacing his words. “I’m not a telephone exchange. I did say that Jack probably wanted her to be taken care of. Which is true.”

“Well, he’s being very cryptic about it,” Shane said, deciding not to engage. “If she showed that letter to cops, I’m surprised they didn’t go straight to life insurance fraud. ‘I’ll fix it’ really has that ring.”

“Well, luckily there’s not a policy between the three of them,” Ryan said.

“Speaking of the three of them,” Shane started slowly. Ryan pinned him with the same look he’d used after Shane had asked if there was crystal ball stashed away in one of his many boxes. “Did you notice they were all … together?”

“In about five minutes,” Ryan said flatly. “Also, Sophia told me. Why, how long did it take you?” 

“Oh,” Shane said. “I will be honest, at least ten. Perhaps even fifteen. I don’t have your keen otherworldly eyes.”

Ryan didn’t laugh. “Not a great detective, huh?” He paused for a moment, weighing his words, and then continued, “It’s a bit much though, right?”

“What? No.” Shane didn’t want to have this conversation with Ryan right now, or possibly ever. He’d rather be left to nurse his unfortunate crush in peace, the way you nursed a broken limb. In both cases, it worked better if no one stepped on the break.

“Huh,” Ryan said, and his expression relaxed just a little. “Well. Good.”

He was being sounded-out, Shane realized. The boot came off the injury.

“Jesus, though,” Shane said, “What’s worse than leaving one person behind? It turns out – leaving two. Awful idea.”

“So, what,” Ryan said, “you never love anyone so no one get hurt when you die?”

“Well,” Shane said. “That was the _plan_.”

Whatever answer Ryan might have made was forestalled by a sudden shout, directed at both of them. Three of the navy men had peeled away from their comrades and closed the distance without Shane noticing. They looked fractious.

“You boys were here with the cops,” one of them said, a tall man with a New York accent that had softened at the edges. He was still wearing his uniform, and it identified him as SN Fairholme.

“Nope,” Shane said at once. He stepped back so he could put himself between this man and Ryan. “Must have mistaken us, sorry. Thanks for your service.”

“Don’t be fucking cute,” Fairholme snarled, as he stepped in and seized Shane by the collar. 

Shane had been in a few fights before, and he’d gotten alive out of all of them the same way – by not resisting and waiting for it to be over. If he was very lucky, they’d be satisfied with hitting him a couple of times and leaving Ryan out of it.

“Fucking nosy bastard, aren’t you?” Fairholme said. Shane had just enough time to register the elbow swung at his face before it connected with his temple and his vision blacked out. A fist caught him hard in the gut, and then he was on the ground. He could hear Ryan shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. He wondered if this was how it had gone for Jack.

One of their assailants grabbed Ryan and started dragging him away. Shane’s head was ringing; he couldn’t get his feet under him to stand up. He couldn’t get his breath to yell.

“Little shit,” he heard one of the men say, and now Ryan was at the water’s edge, being shoved out at arm’s length so he was leaning backwards into air. “You let poor Page’s death be.”

“He was _murdered,_ ” Ryan said, and oh fuck no.

_Don’t do this Ryan_ , Shane thought, struggling to his knees. _For once in your life, shut your mouth_.

There was a beat; Shane wasn’t going to get there in time. Then the man holding Ryan hit him hard in the stomach and shoved him over the edge. A dull thud, and the sound of a body hitting water.

One of the men cut Shane a venomous look. They turned, and walked away.

Shane’s heart felt like it had stopped. Cold adrenaline flooded through him and forced him up, scrambling on his hands and knees to the dockside. Disturbed brown water. No sign of Ryan. He didn’t bother to get back to his feet and dive, just dropped himself over the edge.

He hit the water, and then everything _was_ the water. Opaque and filthy, stinging his eyes when he tried to open them, soaking his clothes and pulling him down, water filling up his nose, pressing against his mouth. Shane forced his eyes open again, got a murky glimpse of something to his left and lunged close enough to grab. He kicked upwards, dragging the dead weight with him.

Shane broke the surface of the water with two fistfuls of a spluttering, struggling Ryan. Almost at once, Ryan’s panicked flailing dragged them both back down, and Shane swallowed a mouthful that would probably kill him as soon as it hit his stomach.

“Stop kicking,” he yelled hoarsely, with Ryan still fighting wildly in his grip. Ryan thrashed once more for good measure then went limp, finally realizing that he was no longer drowning.

“Shane?” he coughed. “Jesus.”

Shane shifted his grip so that he had one arm around Ryan’s chest and started to drag him backwards through the water, towards a questionable looking access ladder.

“You’re okay,” Shane said quietly, grabbing onto the lowest rung. “Alright, we’re okay. Can you climb up here?”

Ryan was still coughing violently, but he nodded. Shane didn’t let him go until it was literally impossible to keep holding on, and then waited until Ryan made it to the top and onto dry land, just in case he toppled backwards, and Shane had to fish him out again. Also, it was quite nice not having to support his own limbs. He could just lie back and float out to sea, and then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this anymore.

He was shaken out of his reverie by Ryan’s head reappearing over the edge. “Shane?”

“Yeah, I’m coming.” His feet slipped over the slimy rung the first time, and then the second, but eventually he got a good foothold and started to haul himself out of the water. The weight of his body seemed unbearable after the comfortable buoyancy of the Pacific, and if Ryan hadn’t been there to grab his hand at the last moment, Shane would probably have fallen back into the water.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ryan said again, falling back once he’d pulled Shane fully up onto the dock. “Are you alright? I saw him hit you and –”

“I’m fine,” Shane interrupted. “You got thrown into the fucking ocean. I thought you’d drowned.”

“Can’t get rid of me that easy,” Ryan said, swiping at his face to get water of his eyes. Shane refused to countenance the possibility he was crying. “And even if you did, I’d haunt the office. That’d teach you. I’d be right then.”

“Okay,” Shane said. Ryan was trembling, almost imperceptibly, rivulets of water streaming down his face, and Shane just wanted to reach out and touch him, to stop imagining his body being dragged out with the current. “Okay,” he said again.

For a minute, neither of them spoke, the sounds of the water and the dock punctuated by Ryan coughing. As panic faded, Shane could feel a dull throb down his side where he’d hit the ground, a vibrant web of pain unfolding from his temple. His sodden clothes were freezing to his skin.

“Okay,” he said a third time and thought he finally sounded like himself. “Okay, Ryan, in future do you think we could _not_ antagonize the men who outnumber us two to one? Who have military training? Could we _try that_?”

“What, don’t yell at me,” Ryan cried, outraged. “I almost drowned! And I was right. He was _wrapped in a tarp_.”

“Yes, I know you’re right, and you were almost also _dead_. Be right in your own time! Be right in the office! Don’t be right when someone is literally dangling you over the open ocean!”

“It’s a harbor,” Ryan said archly, and in the interests of not immediately tossing him back into it, Shane didn’t answer. After a moment, Ryan added, _sotto voce_ , “Thanks for coming in after me, though.”

“No problem.” Shane half-heartedly tried to wring water out of his cuffs. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I think I knocked my shoulder going down,” Ryan said, stretching his arm and wincing. “But it doesn’t feel too bad.”

Shane had never really understood the poorly thought-out scrapes his clientele got into, but in this moment, he thought could cheerfully commit assault occasioning bodily harm. Assault intending bodily harm, even. Instead he sighed and said, “Well, Ryan, I think we’ve found our murderers.” 

***

The trip back to the office was an exercise in misery. There was no easier way to elicit ill will on public transport than by dripping onto the other commuters. Shane was frankly surprised by how far they got before being politely asked to leave, and left to continue on foot.

He could acutely feel every inch where wet cloth was chafing against wet skin. His side hurt. His hands stung from trying to break his fall. His head ached, and his legs were threatening to give out at any minute. Meanwhile, Ryan was still coughing – and worse, wincing every time it happened. By the time they’d reached their building, Shane was ready to swear he’d never felt worse in his life, and also that he’d never been so pleased to see Tinsley’s name.

“Thank God,” Ryan said, stumbling over the threshold and immediately collapsing onto a chair. Shane limped to his desk and started opening drawers. This wasn’t the first time he’d completely ruined a set of clothes at work, and he’d stashed a spare set away months ago.

He located a very creased shirt and pair of slacks, and started peeling off layers of cold, wet clothing. He was considering using a spare undershirt as a towel, then realized that Ryan might have more need of it than he did.

“Hey, Bergara, do you have –” Shane turned and stopped dead at the sight of Ryan tugging off his own shirt. His arms were over his head, showing off the lean muscles of his back, the sharp wings of his shoulder blades.

Shane whipped back around. Ryan said something about not laughing, but Shane couldn’t parse the words. Mechanically, he buttoned his shirt and waited for his brain to restart. It turned over and over like a stuck engine, entirely preoccupied with the sight of Ryan’s skin.

Once he’d finally managed to struggle into dry clothes, Shane chanced another look across the office. Ryan was now fully dressed in what Shane would happily swear was the single most outlandish garment he’d ever laid eyes on. Had he been in possession of a working brain, Shane could have howled. As it was, the best he could manage was a kind of stunned half-grin.

“I told you not to laugh,” Ryan said sternly from what appeared to be an entire tent of loosely draped black silk. “Sometimes people only believe you if you look the part.”

“Yes,” Shane said. “My trust in you is certainly sky-rocketing.”

“Shut up, I almost just died.” Ryan turned on heel and strode towards their ancient radiator. His hair was sticking in all directions. The strange black confection slid across his skin, and Shane felt all his thoughts leave again. Perhaps he’d underestimated just how hard he’d been hit. There was no other explanation for finding a man wearing _that_ attractive. Dazedly, he joined Ryan in draping their wet clothes over the radiator, which was now making a series of worrying clunks.

“I’m going to wait here until these are dry, so I can leave without getting arrested,” Ryan said, pulling his velvet footstool over, presumably to watch the drying process occur.

“Seems reasonable.”

“Are you – do you have anyone at home to take care of you? If you die of concussion overnight, I’m going to have a lot of work to do on my own.”

Shane snorted. “I’m not going to die from concussion overnight.”

“Sure, but I think my point still stands.”

“I’m fine,” Shane said. “I’m good at taking care of myself. I got punched last week too, remember, and yet here I am.”

Ryan looked at him intently for a moment, then evidently decided not to press the issue. Shane didn’t ask if there was anyone waiting for Ryan. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, at least not right now. Instead, he pulled over a chair and joined Ryan in front of the wall.

“Ah, to spend a winter’s eve by the light of a roaring radiator,” he said, warming his hands exaggeratedly in front of their clothes.

“Are you missing the icefield you were born in?” Ryan said dryly. He shifted slightly and yards of black silk rustled. It really was the most ridiculous thing Shane had ever seen. It really did sit very well against Ryan’s skin. Shane glanced sideways at it, and then again.

Ryan caught him looking. “Something you want to say?”

“Just – why?”

“I used to hold séances,” Ryan said, in the same way he might have said _I used to be an accountant._ “I wanted people to take me seriously.”

“And this – Ryan, did this _help_?”

Ryan made it clear he thought the question was beneath his dignity.

“So,” Shane tried instead. “No more séances now?”

“The way I, well, _see_ , I guess, doesn’t work for them. I’m too quiet. People want a show, people want answers and I can’t always promise that. So, I stopped.”

“How showy, exactly, is your average séance, Ryan?”

Ryan eyed him suspiciously. Shane tried to look innocent. “I’m sure you’ve seen posters,” Ryan said finally. “But it’s basically just about opening the floor to the spirits. Letting people ask questions.”

“Of course.”

Shane wondered what Sophia, or Etienne, would ask of Jack. Probably the same thing all of Shane’s clients asked: _why_? Across from him, Ryan had propped his chin on one hand, so as to more comfortably stare at his socks, and all Shane could see was a dead man’s face, the rain filling up his eye sockets.

This couldn’t go on. Shane could take a few hits, but this was going to kill one of them. Probably Ryan. They needed to stop. He’d tell Sophia, and they’d walk away.

Shane returned to carefully not staring at Ryan, while gently needling him on the finer points of spirit-rapping and the many ways in which it was entirely fraudulent. Their clothes weren’t drying so much as raising the humidity of the space directly around them, and by the time Ryan gave up on the idea and started to pack up for home, Shane felt distinctly warm.

Outside, though, rain was falling as a fine mist and as he walked home through it, Shane kept imagining lifting a waterlogged tarpaulin from between two stacks of wood and finding Ryan’s pale face staring back at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when LA had a robust public transport system? God, good times. Anyway, here we all are again, stuck in our houses while these two idiots get to wander around at large, still not solving a murder. Unfair! 
> 
> Even More Fun Facts: 
> 
> 1\. This story owes a debt of gratitude to Jake Berman’s [beautiful map](https://www.lataco.com/the-glory-days-of-l-a-public-transit-in-1926-mapped/) of LA’s 1926 streetcar system. The map covers the Pacific Electric’s ‘Red Car’ system, but the LA Railway also ran ‘Yellow Cars’ in central LA. All trams, no waiting! Imagine! 
> 
> 2\. If you are incredibly bored, and would like the experience of being a primary school student watching an educational video, I can highly recommend [The Port of Los Angeles: A History, Part II](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rHa2WZ30PQ), which was very helpful to me. 
> 
> 3\. Sailors didn’t really have their ranks and names on their uniforms in the 20s, but we will choose to ignore that fact for the purposes of this story. 
> 
> 4\. Chapter title is, as always, from Irving Berlin. 
> 
> Thank you so much again to everyone reading. I’m very cooped-up and you all brighten my days.


	4. I Love to Quarrel with You

Even familiar scent of old smoke and sweet incense wasn’t enough to settle Shane’s worries as he stepped out of the elevator and into the dim corridor. By mutual agreement, both he and Ryan had taken yesterday off, and Shane felt much, much worse for it. Twenty-four hours of going slowly mad inside his own four walls had left his nerves scrubbed raw. It hadn’t really done anything for the fresh bruise blossoming over his temple, either.

A neighbor whose name Shane had misplaced was leaning against the door of the tattoo shop, a stained rag slung over his shoulder. Most of his arms were lost in blue ink. He nodded to Shane.

“Madej.”

Shane touched his hat perfunctorily. “Early start?”

“Couple of navy boats heading out on Tuesday,” the man said with a wolfish grin. “Lots of boys making bad life choices while they can.”

“Well, make ‘em regret it,” Shane said and continued down the empty, echoing hall.

He found the door unlocked and Ryan already in, back in his usual clothes and flicking through his cards. He pulled one from the pack, swore at it sadly, and started the process again.

“Don’t tell me,” Shane said from the doorway. “It’s locusts.”

Ryan looked up. “What?”

“Your cards. You’ve peered into the nebulous future and seen that we’re in for a plague.”

Ryan glared down at the deck. “If only,” he muttered.

Shane privately agreed. If he were eaten by locusts, he’d never have to think about the particular gray of drowned skin again, or the way the ceiling plaster was starting to sag, or indeed, the look of concern Ryan was now leveling at him.

“Are you sure you should be here?” Ryan asked. “You’re about six different shades of blue. I’m sort of struggling to remember what color your skin was when we met.”

Shane ran his tongue lightly over the raw line where his lip was still healing. He knew he looked pretty bad. “I was the delicate gold of an unripe ear of corn,” he said and Ryan wheezed a small laugh.

“Ok, so I know this is your day in the office–” Ryan said, packing his cards away. Shane honestly hadn’t remembered that. “–but I’ve done some research and I thought if you had a moment…?”

“You’ve got all day, I don’t have any appointments,” Shane said, rubbing his eyes. “Unless you have an impoverished ghost family to evict. Ghost parents not paying the rent. Ghost children to send to the workhouse.”

“Hilarious.” Ryan followed Shane over to his desk. “I’ve been looking into what Jack might have meant in that letter–”

“What, no,” Shane said quickly. “Ryan, no, come on, you’re not serious?”

As far as Shane was concerned, the moment he’d gotten smacked in the head was the exact instant this case was, excuse the phrase, dead to him. The moment Ryan had gotten dumped into the harbor, he’d decided he would pour gasoline over the office and light it on fire before he put Ryan in danger again.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ryan bristled.

“Ryan, did you miss the part where you were _thrown off a dock_? We’re leaving this alone.”

“We promised Sophia,” Ryan said, a dangerous glint coming into his eyes. “And, also, I’d prefer _not_ to be haunted forever, which I’m pretty sure is going to happen if we don’t finish this.”

Shane rolled his eyes and then realized it was a mistake when Ryan’s expression hardened. “I’d rather be haunted than dead,” he said. “In fact, I’d very much prefer that! If I hadn’t pulled you out of the water, there is a non-zero chance that you would, right now, be dead! And if you weren’t investigating this with me, you wouldn’t have been in the water in the first place, and so we’re done. End of story.”

“First of all,” Ryan said. “You are investigating this with me. Second, you have the worst service of any PI I’ve ever met. Third, we’re not done.”

“I said, _I said_ , that if this was a military conspiracy, we’d leave it alone! And look at that! We got jumped by a couple of navy guys, who have been trained on our tax dime to beat a man to death with their fists. I’m out. Ryan, I’m out.”

“You don’t have proof it was a cover-up.”

“Well, gee, Ryan, I don’t know – I guess if the police have said it was an accident and these navy boys are closing ranks over it, it must just be an honest mistake. I’m sure all we’ll have to do is politely point it out –”

“All right, Jesus,” Ryan muttered. “Don’t fucking patronize me.”

Neither of them spoke. Shane couldn’t quite bring himself to apologize, but he didn’t like the way Ryan was now furiously glaring at the wall. He hated that Ryan though he was being patronized, when what he was actually being was protected.

“Christ,” Shane said, mostly to himself. Ryan turned to glare at him. “I didn’t mean – never mind.”

Ryan didn’t answer, just turned, went back to his own desk, and began sorting through papers. Shane pulled out his own case files and yesterday’s paper. He had a long-standing investigation involving a deli owner and smuggled trade secrets to catch up on, but the simmering tension in the room made it hard to focus. Was it too late to take back what he’d said about being free all day and kick Ryan out of the office? Shane glanced up, and the look on Ryan’s face was so miserable that he immediately dismissed the idea.

Unfortunately, Ryan caught him staring. His head snapped up to meet Shane’s gaze and he continued as if there had been no pause. “So, we can’t actually make sure anyone goes to jail. Don’t you at least want to know what Jack had that was worth killing over?” 

“Honestly?” Shane said. “No. No, I do not. Let it be a mystery.”

Ryan pulled a face. “You said you’d help me,” he said sullenly.

Shane had a sudden, slightly hazy recollection of Ryan saying that the only people who listened to him wanted something from him. Shane sighed. The heart was an awful, treacherous thing. He should have joined the Pinkertons, and done away with it entirely.

“All right,” he said. “All right, show me whatever nightmare you’ve found. It had better not be more ghouls.”

“I keep telling you, _there are no ghouls_ ,” Ryan said. He and his folder of papers crossed the room and swung up to perch on Shane’s desk. He then dropped his file directly onto Shane’s notes, setting off a cascade across the desktop. Shane shoved his chair back from the desk as though it might be catching.

“Careful!”

“Shit, sorry.” Ryan scrambled to gather up his notes, almost kicking Shane in the process. One of Shane’s papers fluttered gently to the floor, immediately followed by the clatter of a pen. The room had always been a little small for both of them, but now it was smothering. Ryan was so close his knee was practically jammed against Shane’s ribs.

Between his unsettled frustration and the way he could now see where Ryan’s shirt was starting to come untucked, Shane wasn’t certain he could stay like this and still get any work done.

“You know what?” he said, before Ryan could launch into an explanation of his research. “Let’s do this somewhere else.”

***

“Should I be worried about them never finding my body? It kind of feels like I should be worried about them never finding my body.”

It had taken half an hour to gather their things and ride the streetcar up into city, where they’d changed into a cab. Ryan hadn’t asked where it was headed, and Shane hadn’t offered. Somewhere along the way the tension had bled out: Shane could feel the tight spool of his psyche unwinding.

“Yes, Ryan,” he said. “After several days on this case, I’ve finally figured out how to dispose of you without anyone noticing. Our friends’ mistakes at the docks? I’ve learned from them.”

Ryan wheezed and went back to peering out the window. The electric tumble of the city had given way to the sparser houses and lingering fields of Los Feliz, where the exploratory feelers of LA’s endless expansion hadn’t quite gotten a hold. The road had a half-finished look, and it kept breaking out into patches of construction: piles of scraped-up dirt and stacks of concrete. It did look like corpse territory, Shane would freely admit.

The cab pulled past the entrance to Griffith Park, the violent gleam of civilization briefly reasserting itself in picnic tables and a sign that pointed to the zoo, where studio directors dumped their used animals. (“Is it lions?” Ryan asked. “Are you going to feed my body to lions?”). And then they were again in the untamed chaparral, thick tumbles of sagebrush and mallow, hard edges of exposed rock.

They drove up into hills, and finally stopped at another picnic ground. A few older couples were sitting on the wooden benches, looking warm. A couple of kids. It still seemed like corpse territory. Shane paid their driver, and instructed him to return in two hours.

Ryan was turning around, looking pleased. “Why are we paying rent when we could be working up here for free?” he said. “This is _nice_.”

Shane made a non-committal noise. It wasn’t, as far as he was concerned, a frozen pond or a stubbled wheat field under a white dusting of snow, but it was (as Ryan had so very astutely pointed out) not their office, and so it would do. He headed towards one of the trails, away from their fellow citizens. Whatever ridiculous theory Ryan was going to try and sell now didn’t need to be heard by anyone else.

“You know this land was donated to the city,” Shane said conversationally as they walked, the dusty green leaves humming with insects. “But Griffith did also shoot his wife, so we shouldn’t give him too much credit.”

Ryan nodded. “That would explain the curse,” he said.

Shane stopped. He looked down at Ryan. Very slowly, he ran a hand through his hair. “What curse, Ryan?”

“Everyone who owned property up here has died,” Ryan said in a low, conspiratorial voice. ‘Because it’s cursed.”

Shane kept walking. “Of course. Seems reasonable.”

“People tried to ranch, but they always failed. Dairy cows died. Locusts ate the crops.”

“I knew there were going to be locusts today,” Shane said. They passed a stand of eucalypt, strips of bark hanging off trees the same bloodless gray of waterlogged flesh. Loose rocks slid under his feet.

“Yes,” Shane continued. “I can certainly see no other reason why a dairy farm wouldn’t thrive on this perfectly flat and abundant grassland. It must be cursed.”

As if to drive the point home, Shane promptly caught the tip of his shoe on a misplaced rock and went pitching forwards. He wouldn’t have hit the ground, but Ryan shot out a hand to grab him anyway.

“ _You see_ ,” Ryan hissed. “This is a hill of misfortune.” His fingers were wrapped around Shane’s arm.

“All right,” Shane said. It seemed much easier to indulge Ryan now. The fresh air, despite how many bugs it held, was working. Shane found he was almost eager to hear whatever absolutely unfounded nonsense was going to come out of Ryan’s mouth next. “So, what have you got in your folder? Hit me.”

The path inclined upwards, the insects growing louder. Occasionally, Shane could hear a bird wailing in the trees. He’d heard there were bobcats still living up here, stalking the cliffs above the new developments, and as ready to eat a wayward housewife as they were a rabbit.

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Theory one: whatever solution Jack was talking about, it was something completely above board. Bonds come in good.” 

“Right,” Shane nodded. “A wise investment in stocks.”

They looked at each other for a moment.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so either,” said Ryan. “My next thought was insurance fraud, and we’ve already covered that. Which brings me to my third and final theory: he took something while he was serving overseas.”

“Looted, you mean?”

Ryan glanced around, as though worried about being overheard. On either side of the trail, grass-blooms shivered in the air. “Yeah. Lots of people were doing it. But I think it would have had to be something pretty serious, if he’d never mentioned it before.”

“Something recognizable.”

“So, I looked into missing treasures.”

Shane felt the case open up under his feet. “Please don’t say anything that includes the words Russia or egg,” he said.

Ryan smiled the way he did right before the tarot cards came out. “How about this instead: the Florentine Diamond?”

Shane did not like jewelry that came with its own name. That absolutely meant trouble.

“It went missing during the war,” Ryan continued. “And the rumor is that it ended up in the States. It’s worth seven million.”

Shane stumbled again. “I’m sorry?”

“Enough to kill for,” Ryan said, and his pleased look faded.

“Enough not to tell your family,” Shane agreed, stunned. “Ryan, are you sure? I mean, that is an incredible thing to steal. You really think there’s a seven-million-dollar diamond sitting in a shoebox somewhere in that house? I feel like someone would have noticed.”

“I think it’s probably elsewhere,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t keep something like that in the house with me.”

“Because it’s cursed? Please, Ryan, don’t tell me you think it’s cursed.”

Ryan stopped to glare and to catch his breath, hands on his hips. “It’s not _cursed_ ,” he said. “It’s just very valuable and probably a break-in risk. I wouldn’t keep that in the same place as I kept the people I loved.”

“So, what,” Shane said helplessly. “It could be literally anywhere else? Presuming, of course, that you’re right, which is a pretty big presumption.”

Ryan shrugged. “Well, we don’t exactly have much else,” he said. “So why not look into this?”

They’d reached a rise in the trail, the hill sloping away on either side. In the valley on the left, more ground was being cleared. Further away, Shane knew, the Hollywoodland sign was glowering down on the subdivisions, where a hundred couples were arguing about dinner, about whose fault it was that the children weren’t dressed, about who had last seen Aunt Mavis’s antique brooch. About where, exactly, they had been the night before. Somewhere in the midst of all that, a stolen diamond smaller than a thumbnail, waiting to save a family, or to ruin them.

“Ryan,” he said. “Where the hell do we start?”

***

They stopped to eat on the way home, a counter meal served by one of the thousand or so teenagers who’d flocked to the coast to usurp Clara Bow. If he had more time, Shane would go around personally warning each and every one of them.

He felt calmer after an hour marching up and down the scrub, as though an anxious fist inside his chest had unfolded into a twitchy palm-up acceptance. He was drinking tea, though, still clinging to the whimsical idea of not dying from heart attack until he was at least forty. Ryan, on the other hand, was throwing back coffee so fast Shane thought that maybe this was how he’d come to believe in the supernatural. You started seeing things, when so much of your blood-stream was the kind of brown muck they were serving here.

“The problem is,” Ryan was saying, “is that even if we’re right about – this, we still have no way of knowing where he might have hid it.”

“If he’s hidden it,” Shane added. “Maybe it’s in his pocket in the morgue.”

Ryan frowned and ignored him. He really didn’t have a good stomach for the sordid, small realities of detective work. Fine for drinks that smelled like they’d burn through metal, though, Shane noted, as Ryan held his cup out to a passing waitress with bobbed hair and big eyes.

“Do you think the guys who jumped us have it?”

“No,” said Shane. “They wouldn’t have risked starting a brawl if they had seven million in their pockets. It would have been easier just to slip away quietly. They wanted to warn us off.”

“How did they know, though? If I’d stolen a priceless artifact –” Ryan’s voice dropped as the men at the next table scraped back their chairs to leave. “– I wouldn’t tell anyone. I mean his own – Sophia and Etienne didn’t know.”

Shane had been thinking about this as they came down the mountain. He wasn’t entirely convinced that Ryan was right about the priceless gem, but the idea that Jack had something valuable socked away was plausible. And Shane thought he might know how such a secret had been exposed. There had been two matching, clasped boxes on the Moreno’s console table – maybe they contained matching letters. 

“I think there was another letter,” Shane said slowly. “If Jack wrote to them separately, he might have said the same things to Etienne. But they were in the war together – so maybe Etienne already knew what had been stolen. Maybe Jack was more forthright. And then maybe that letter never got posted.”

Ryan was nodding. “And if anyone took it and read it … they’d know Jack had something valuable.”

“And they might have tried to beat it out of him.”

Ryan grimaced. “Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked. So, the diamond – if it is the diamond – is still out there.”

“Thank goodness it’s a small city the man never left in his life,” Shane said drily.

“I do have an idea about that actually –” Ryan started, then Shane went to put his empty cup aside and things got very strange, very fast.

Before Shane could set the cup down, Ryan grabbed him, wrapping both hands around Shane’s, which was still wrapped around the cup. Shane could feel the sudden pressure of Ryan’s fingertips against his knuckles as vividly as he’d feel an electric shock.

“Why don’t we see what the leaves have to say?” Ryan said mildly, as though nothing unusual had happened.

“The _leaves_?” Shane wanted to put his head in his hands, but he couldn’t do that because one of them was trapped. Ryan’s palms were very warm. It was very distracting.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Ryan said simply, as though Shane were the unreasonable one at this table, and then he leaned in to peer down into the dregs of what had been a perfectly adequate cup of tea, moving Shane’s hand in small circles in order to swirl the remaining mouthful around the cup.

Ryan was so close Shane could see the full sweep of his lashes as he looked down, and appreciate the way a day of unexpected sun had turned his skin bronze. Shane realized he was staring, and quickly dropped his gaze to the cup. It wasn’t nearly as interesting.

Ryan tilted their hands so the last of the cold tea slopped up the side of the cup, and if he got this on Shane’s shirt, Shane was going to kill him – or at least frown at him intently.

“Ryan, there’s like five leaves in there, what exactly are you hoping to achieve?”

“Shush.”

“Did you just _shush me_?”

“And I’ll do it again,” Ryan threatened, then prised the cup out of Shane’s hands in order to flip it upside down on the saucer. Shane tried to convey a wordless apology to the waitress. He missed the warmth of Ryan’s hands.

“That had better be a map of the greater LA area,” he said, leaning over to look as Ryan turned the cup back upright. “And it better have an X where this diamond is.”

A fine scattering of tea leaves, like a dark constellation, was stuck to the inside of the cup. Ryan turned it around in his hands, humming softly to himself.

“Your leaves are mysterious,” he said in a low, arcane voice, and Shane immediately wanted to cheerfully strangle him. “But you’ve got an anchor, see?”

“If you try to tell me that my cup of tea wants me to investigate the US Navy…”

Ryan kicked him under the table. “No, it’s a symbol of success and stability. It’s a good omen.”

Shane took his cup back and comprehensibly failed to see whatever it was Ryan was imagining in the spackled tea pulp. “Well, who I am to doubt the word of this twenty-five-cent cup of tea?” he said. His brain was busy filing away the memory of Ryan’s touch, and perhaps because it was so otherwise occupied, the world felt hopeful and remarkably manageable.

Ryan smiled. “See, Detective Madej? I told you we were going to solve this one.”

Despite his better judgment, Shane felt a tiny part of himself agree.

***

In hindsight, Shane was a fool to trust a cup of cold tea with his future. On Monday, he stepped out of the lift and directly over his own personal line in the sand.

The woman was probably in her forties, reserved in a dark green dress. She was crying openly. In the instant before he collided with her, Shane caught a glimpse of a gilt star over her heart.

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” she said, as he immediately flung out a hand to steady them both.

“My fault,” Shane said. “I wasn’t looking, miles away, sorry.” He was looking now. At her salt-raw face and her neat black gloves. At that grim little badge of sacrifice and suffering. _Ryan_ , he thought, _what have you done?_

The woman extracted herself with a polite smile and disappeared behind the lattice of the elevator cage. Shane didn’t stay to watch her disappear into the floor, but hurried down the corridor, his stomach sinking.

Ryan’s faced brightened as Shane unlatched the door, and the first thing Shane could find to say was, “Ryan, _no_.”

Ryan’s expression faltered for just a moment. “Always, ‘Ryan, no’,” he said. “Never, ‘Ryan, thank you for using your rare professional skills to help me solve a murder’.”

_I thought we’d agreed I was assisting you_ , Shane thought automatically but did not say. What he said was, “Who was that?”

“Elizabeth?” Ryan said, his brows drawing together. “She wanted help contacting someone, but we weren’t particularly successful.”

Shane took a breath. “Ryan, you can’t – I won’t. _Christ_. Why would you tell someone you can talk to their dead husband or their dead son? Why wouldn’t you just let the wound _heal_?”

The look on Ryan’s faced hardened into something brittle and bitter. “Alright, first, I didn’t _tell_ anyone anything, these people come to me.”

“That doesn’t mean –”

“ _Second_ , it’s not up to you how people deal with the death of their own loved ones!”

“You’re taking advantage of them, Ryan!”

Ryan threw the cards he’d been holding onto his table, where they spilled off the edge and onto the floor. “ _I am not faking this_. I know you don’t believe me, but Jesus Christ. Do you really think I’d scam war widows? Is that all you think of me?”

“No, I –” Shane felt his righteousness ebbing. He didn’t think that. He didn’t know what he thought, just that he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let this happen. 

“Do you know where the ghosts of people who died in Europe are?” Ryan continued, his expression stormy. “They’re in fucking Europe, Shane! I’m not having conversations, I’m getting the barest of whispers, and that is what I tell my clients. So far, the only person who thinks I’m taking advantage is _you._ ”

“Ryan, I –”

“Don’t _Ryan_ me,” Ryan snapped. He stopped for a moment, breathing hard. Then, “I can’t believe I’ve been assuming we were friends and you were waiting for me to, I don’t know, steal someone’s pension. Did you let me move in so you could, what, keep an eye on me?”

_Of course not_ , Shane wanted to say. _I wanted to be your friend. I am your friend. I want to trust you. I think I do._

Ryan was staring at him with un-tempered hurt, and Shane’s voice stuck in his throat.

“You are my friend,” he finally managed. Ryan snorted.

“Do you want to know why she was here? Since I apparently answer to you now? She had a dream that her son was calling for her. Sixteen years old. Killed in France.” Ryan paused to glare. “I told her that I couldn’t hear anything, that sometimes a dream is just a dream. We talked about what it might mean. She told me about her kid.”

Underneath it all, Shane felt a flood of affection. He shouldn’t have needed to be told.

“Ryan, I’m – shit. I’m sorry. I thought –” 

“You thought the worst of me,” Ryan said simply. “You always think the worst of me.”

_I’ve thought the worst of everyone for a long time_ , Shane thought. _I’m so sorry,_ Shane thought. _I’m still figuring this out._

“I don’t,” he protested weakly. “I never thought you’d hurt anyone on purpose. You told me you weren’t conning people, and I believed you. I do.”

“No, you just think I don’t know what I’m doing. That I’m going to hurt people unintentionally because I’m delusional.”

Shane shook his head. “I do think you know what you’re doing,” he said in a small voice.

As soon as it was said aloud, he knew it was true. He trusted Ryan. He might not believe in ghosts, but he trusted Ryan to navigate the murky waters of people who did. He hadn’t realized it until he’d thought Ryan had proved him wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I do trust you with this.”

“Do you really.” Ryan ducked down to pick up the deck he’d thrown, scooping the mess of cards off the floor. He flipped one and frowned at it. “Do you also know why I wouldn’t try and contact someone who’d died like that?” Ryan asked, not looking up. Shane said nothing. “It terrifies me. That much pain and anger and hurt. I can barely deal with Jack.”

Shane wanted to drop down next to Ryan and help. He wanted to kick himself in the shins.

“And what if I had been?” Ryan straightened up, dropped a handful of cards on his table. “Trying to contact her son, I mean. Would you still be telling me how much you trust me?”

“If you had been,” Shane started then stopped. He felt uncertain about all the promises he’d made himself. He felt right on the thin edge of his world, one good shove away from shattering. He still didn’t think that anyone could summon the dead. But there was more to the dead than ghosts.

He thought of Ryan, falling over his verbs in Sophia’s living room; spending an hour conjuring the memory of a teenager soldier; telling Shane over and over again that things would be okay, in cards and tea leaves and white noise. He didn’t believe what Ryan believed, but he trusted Ryan to use it well.

“If you had been,” he said again, “then I’d trust you were doing it for the right reasons. Look, I don’t always believe what you tell me. I don’t always agree with you about what is happening. But I trust you.”

Ryan stared at him, expression unreadable for a long time, and then the look of hurt and defense broke. He gave Shane a small, sad smile.

“Well,” he said. “That’s. Thank you.”

Shane managed a weak smile in return. He wondered how long it would be before Ryan would take his hands in a cafe again and read his fortune. Maybe he never would. Maybe it was more important that Shane had figured this out. He would be like the hermit in Ryan’s cards. Alone, but knowing.

“Elizabeth’s son reminded me of you, you know?” Ryan said.

“Oh?”

“Very stubborn. Lied about his age. Couldn’t begin to imagine there was anyone in the world that knew better than he did.” Ryan looked up, a sly smile on his lips.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t talk to him then,” Shane said. “Since apparently you get enough of that at home.”

“Just don’t let it kill you,” Ryan said, suddenly serious once more. “It wouldn’t hurt you to consider all the options, sometimes.”

“I know. I am sorry.”

Ryan waved it off. “Look, I know that we said we’d share Monday afternoons,” he said. “But do you think I could have the room for a few more hours? I want to try something and I think it will annoy you.”

Shane opened his mouth and closed it again. He hadn’t fixed this. Whatever damage he could see was probably just the start of a thousand small fractures. He’d be lucky to keep Ryan as a friend.

“Of course,” he found himself saying. “The less time I spend here, the harder it is for the petty and sordid to find me.”

He _would_ be lucky to have Ryan as a friend. Maybe it was time to leave it there. To let the open wound of wanting close over. Why had he been nursing it like a gash if not for the hope it would heal?

“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” Ryan called after him as he left. Shane lifted a hand in acknowledgement, and carried the words with him as he stepped out into the flat, blue-gray patina of another overcast LA afternoon. Above him, the streetlamps cast just enough light to go by, and no more. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll stop insulting the Pinkertons the moment they send someone back in time to stop their agents from being strike-breakers. 
> 
> A Truly Unnecessary Number of Fun Facts:
> 
> 1\. A big shout out to the Los Feliz Improvement Association for their lovely collection of historic photos of Griffith Park and surrounds, upon which I relied heavily. 
> 
> 2\. The Florentine Diamond was misplaced by the Hapsburgs around the end of WW1 – it really was rumoured to have been taken to the States in the 1920s, so keep your eyes open, I guess! 
> 
> 3\. Clara Bow is my favourite silent film actress, and I bring her up here to specifically mention that in 1927 she appeared in a film called Wings, which is a) very good and b) contains the first on-screen kiss between two men. A banner year for films, 1927! Between this, The Jazz Singer, and Metropolis, it really paved the way for Loud Gay Noir. 
> 
> 4\. Chapter title, again, from Mr. Berlin.
> 
> Beautiful readers, I hope the interior of your houses (or your essential jobs!) are treating you as gently as possible, and thank you again so much for improving my own confinement.


	5. And Father Wanted Me to Learn a Trade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild content warning: this chapter discusses a state-sponsored execution by hanging.

The great beauty of a speakeasy was that at three o’clock in the afternoon it maintained the countenance of one in the morning. The shadows of a midnight escapade were never quite evicted come sunrise; the bad drinks, low lights, and ill-tuned pianos were timeless. A well-run speakeasy hid the sadness of mid-afternoon drinking from the drinker.

Without any other work to do, and with no desire to go home, Shane found himself once more at the Jenever Club. Customers were normally sparse on a weekday afternoon, but today there were none at all, save the man by the door, who had given Shane an odd look as he passed.

Kelsey was still behind the bar, though, and she looked up as Shane stepped off the stairs. In a sweet blue dress with her hair down, she seemed more like a church organist than a criminal. She didn’t appear happy to see him.

“Oh, it’s you, Madej. Come to arrest me, lawman?”

Shane glanced around the empty room, suddenly wary. “What’s going on, Impicciche?”

“You haven’t heard.”

Prohibition could have ended in the last three hours and Shane wouldn’t have heard. “You’ve declared a national holiday?”

Kelsey didn’t smile as she beckoned him over and started pouring a drink that was two thirds sugar syrup. It was an awful time for her to develop ideas about sensible consumption.

“Goldsworth’s been executed,” she said. “This morning.”

Their local mobster, the one whose trial had eaten up the crime columns of every paper. A small cog of LA’s robust criminal underground, and the sort of person that Shane absolutely, under no circumstances had dealings with.

“He was one of our set,” Kelsey continued, sliding the glass over. She leaned in close enough that Shane could smell her perfume. “No one knows what he said to the cops. No one thought it would get this far.”

“You think he ratted on you all,” Shane breathed. “Kelsey, are you safe?”

She leaned back, smiling grimly. “Well, I sure don’t pay those LAPD boys for their looks, so I should hope so. Everyone else though – who knows.”

Shane watched as Kelsey poured herself straight gin. “I didn’t pick him as the type to talk,” he said. “Maybe you should be more worried about whoever gave the cops enough to arrest him.”

Kelsey looked at him strangely. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said, as though just because Shane enjoyed the occasional illegal beverage, he should be _au fait_ with the comings and goings of the entire LA underclass.

“No one snitched on him,” Kelsey continued. “No one would have dared. Goldsworth walked himself into the station and confessed. Enough to hang him. They barely needed a trial.”

Shane choked on his drink. “ _What_? Why?”

“I heard someone killed a police consultant he was fond of. And he turned – just like that.” She set her glass back down on the bench: a dull, final thud.

“Jesus.” Shane didn’t feel sad, exactly, but he thought of the rope. “That’s … that’s a pretty big change of heart.”

Kelsey pondered this. “Sometimes, people find something bigger than their loyalty,” she said. “Bigger than their beliefs.” She refilled her glass, raised it to touch Shane’s. “Pray it never happens to us.”

***

Shane spent more of the afternoon than he should have with Kelsey, who, despite having no other customers, refused to serve him more than two weak drinks. By the time she kicked him out, the clouds had broken into a sea of swells and crests, blushing pink and orange.

It was a reasonable hour to go home, and he doubted Ryan would want to see him, but Shane headed back to the office anyway. In the gathering dark, the streetcar felt like a ship dragged out on a tide, like a prison bus rattling up the coast – inexorably pulled towards a reckoning.

A handful of stars were visible above the neon fizz of the city as Shane stepped back into their building, and for the second time, unlocked the office door to find a room full of spitting static.

Ryan jumped as the door swung open and quickly shut off the radio. “Oh,” he said. In the sudden absence of sound, the air seemed to ring. “I didn’t mean you had to leave all day. Sorry.”

Shane shrugged. He almost wished Ryan had left the damn thing on, if only so he didn’t have to be alone with Ryan’s quiet, careful tone. “I went to see Kelsey,” he said.

Ryan’s expression flickered. “How is she?”

“You know. Awful, as usual. Highly illegal.”

For a second, Ryan almost smiled, still idly turning dials.

“Oh, someone came looking for you,” he said suddenly, looking up and gesturing to Shane’s desk. An envelope was just visible atop the piles of other papers. Ryan had clearly not expected Shane back, because there was a note as well: _Madej – A woman called about a dog._

“Oh God,” Shane said under his breath, breaking the seal on the envelope with great trepidation. If Mrs. J. had written him another letter …

Instead, he found a curl of coarse, tannish hair and an honest-to-God ransom note, clipped piecemeal from newsprint. There were kidnappers. They had the dog named Pinky. They wanted five hundred dollars sent through the _post_. The old woman had been right. And, Christ, Shane was tired of being wrong.

He folded up the letter and Ryan’s note and dropped all of it in a drawer. It could wait.

“Ryan, I –” he started, and then stumbled to a halt. Ryan looked tired and unsure, and Shane wanted to reach out for him so badly he could barely think. He took a breath and tried to put the feeling away. “Ryan, I’m sorry. For what I said. I – I am your friend. At least, I hope I still am.” 

Ryan’s brows drew together, he opened his mouth to speak, and then he rolled his eyes instead. “Of course you’re still my friend,” he muttered. “ _Stupid_.”

A door slammed in the corridor: a neighbor giving up for the evening. Caught between a rush of relief and lingering sorrow, Shane felt worn thin – as though if he turned the wrong way, he’d disappear. The radio was silent on Ryan’s table. Shane took a breath.

“Didn’t you say that thing worked better if there were two of us in the room?” he said, walking over. “Should I raise my arms in the air, or will just standing here do?”

A look of incredulous delight spread across Ryan’s face. “I think you just standing there would be the equivalent of any normal person raising their arms,” he said, grinning. 

“Yeah, you’re real funny. What are you trying to do?”

Ryan paused, hovering over the tuners. “I thought I should try talking to Jack again. Now that we’ve got the right questions.”

Shane wanted to protest, but his usual arguments seemed to have fled. “That does sound slightly better than combing through this entire city for a rock the size of a pea,” he admitted. Ryan didn’t _beam_ , per se, but he certainly looked pleased. Shane eyed the radio suspiciously. “Are you sure we have to use this, though? Couldn’t we use the cards or a cup of tea or literally anything else?”

“I don’t think he’s strong enough for anything else,” Ryan said. “Like I said, they’re just whispers – the radio is an energy source.”

“They should get you in the paper ads, Ryan,” Shane said. “ _‘The Westinghouse! Unparalleled clarity! Free energy for ghosts!’”_

Ryan just shook his head and gestured for Shane to sit. “Here we go,” he said quietly, and Shane had just enough time to sense he was stepping out into air before the roar of static tore through the room.

“Jack, are you there?” Ryan said seriously to the wall of white noise, spinning the dials back and forth. “I’m Ryan, this is Shane. We uh, we found your body?”

The radio made a noise like a frog gulping. Shane was already reconsidering his decision.

“Good?” Ryan confirmed, pulling the word, as far as Shane could tell, from nowhere. “Yeah, it’s good. We’re helping Sophia like you asked, but we can’t get much further on our own.”

The radio hissed and garbled. Ryan frowned, clearly trying and failing to pick out something intelligible. Shane felt the sound crawl up his skin, getting under his clothes like a physical itch.

“When you were overseas, did you find something?” Ryan asked, catching Shane’s eye significantly. A distorted jumble of sound. “Diamond?” Ryan clarified. “Yeah, that’s what we thought.”

Out of the static, the radio said, _yes_.

There was a good chance, Shane realized, a really good chance that he’d entered into a shared delusion. The noise prickled over his skin, making his hair stand on end.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Ryan continued, apparently unrattled. “We need to know where it is.”

The radio crackled.

… _told … them. del…_

“You told Sophia and Etienne?” Ryan clarified, and the static abruptly resolved into a clear snatch of jazz.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to know about Etienne,” Shane said under his breath.

“It’s okay,” Ryan said to the radio. “We’re …”. He trailed off, and looked helplessly at Shane.

“We’re not assholes,” Shane finished. Ryan barked a laugh. The radio spluttered.

“On the docks?” Ryan repeated. “Oh no. Did you tell the people who killed you where it was?” _Shit_ , he mouthed at Shane.

_Del_? Shane mouthed back.

Static from the radio.

“Can you tell us where it is, please?” Ryan said. “We’re trying to help.”

… _fern … fin …_

“Ferndell?” Shane said out loud. As soon as he spoke, he realized he’d left solid ground. “Is that it?”

Ryan’s hand had gone still on the dial. The radio kept fizzing. The radio said, _yes_.

“Jesus Christ, Ryan, it’s in the park.”

Ryan’s eyes went wide. “Could you, uh, be more specific?” he asked the radio.

Shane couldn’t pick anything out of the ensuing rush of sound, but Ryan said, “Four … branches?” questioningly. Through his unease, Shane felt a rising sense of anger and dread.

They were going to have to go out into the dark and crawl through a park that might have bobcats in it, looking for stolen goods. Because a radio had told them to. Because a dead man needed them to fix his mistake. Sophia and Etienne were going to have to go out into the dark and make the best of it for the rest of their lives. Water in rivulets off a torn tarpaulin. Ryan’s pale face across the table.

“Why, though?” Shane said suddenly, his frustration boiling over. The radio sang its line of static, like a kettle nearing the boil. Ryan was frantically shaking his head, but Shane had started now. “You steal something you could never hope to sell, and then you leave behind the people who love you because of it? What the hell were you thinking? What was the _point_ –”

The radio exploded.

***

Shane’s ears were ringing. His face felt warm. He was on the floor. Interesting. He’d tried to throw a hand up to shield his eyes and must have gone backwards.

“Electrical faults,” he murmured to himself, sitting up awkwardly. “This fucking building.”

Something wet was creeping down the bridge of his nose. The air was acrid with electrical smoke and burnt plastic. Jack was gone, Shane realized, then remembered with a jolt that Jack had never been here. _Ryan?_

Oh, there he was, crawling over from the other side of the table. “Look, I don’t wanna argue with you about wiring,” he said, reaching Shane and kneeling next to him. “But you do have to let me look at your head, okay?”

A bit of blood, because it was blood, dripped into Shane’s mouth. Ryan’s voice sounded high and tinny in his ears.

“Are you okay?” Shane asked and got another taste of copper for his trouble.

“I’m fine,” Ryan said, but his voice was unsteady as he carefully moved Shane’s hair away from what felt, to Shane, like a baseball-sized chunk of missing skin. At least it was on the opposite side to where Fairholme had hit him. Ryan produced a clean handkerchief from a pocket and held it down over Shane’s temple.

“It’s not too bad,” he said, eyes darting across Shane’s face. “But you’re bleeding.”

“It’s a headwound, they bleed,” Shane responded, staring fixedly at Ryan. He couldn’t seem to shift his gaze.

“I think a bit of radio scratched you.”

“I told you I didn’t like that radio.”

“And I told you not to antagonize spirits,” Ryan said, his voice pitching up, pressing slightly harder than was necessary. The jolt of pain snapped Shane back into himself.

“Yeah, this one’s on me,” he agreed weakly. “Should we move before something else explodes? Is Jack still hovering around?”

“Probably,” Ryan said darkly. He took Shane’s hand and placed it firmly over the makeshift bandage. “Hold that,” he instructed, then stood and pulled Shane to his feet.

The office felt tiny and over-charged, full of cotton-wool silence. Ryan herded him across the room and into a chair, before darting back to his own shelves and retrieving an ominous looking black cannister.

Shane watched muzzily as Ryan carefully unscrewed the lid and poured out the contents in a thick line around the entirety of Shane’s desk.

“Is that salt?” he asked. “Will that _help_?”

Ryan carefully stepped over the line he’d created and, having failed to include a second chair in his fairy circle, perched himself on Shane’s desk. “Yes,” he said simply, peeling Shane’s hand away from his head and grimacing. “Spirits can’t cross it.”

“I thought you said they were like whispers.”

“They usually are, but this one, as you may have noticed, just _threw a radio at us_.” Ryan dropped the bloodied handkerchief onto the floor, where it would definitely stain the wood, then replaced it with another. “The bleeding’s slowing down,” he said. “Let’s just … wait here a bit.”

“Seems wise,” Shane said. Now that his own breathing had evened out, he could see the way Ryan’s was hitching, feel the slight tremor in Ryan’s hand. Shane was so sick of being hit, of watching Ryan get hit. If they ever spoke to Jack again, he was absolutely going to keep yelling at him, no matter how many small appliances the man blew up.

“Stop moving around,” Ryan murmured. He shifted so he was leaning forwards, and put one hand on the back of Shane’s head, holding him still while he kept up pressure on the wound. Shane could feel his heartrate start to pick up again.

Ryan’s fingers were in his hair, the heel of his palm was pressed against Shane’s temple, and he was tilting Shane’s head slightly, so that Shane was looking up at him. With adrenaline leaching out of his blood, Shane felt like his joints had been undone. He wanted to close his eyes under the weight of Ryan’s touch, but he knew that if he gave into that temptation, he’d never come back from it.

It wasn’t, all things considered, the perfect situation for Shane to be in, as a man trying to cling to dignity.

Slowly, he became aware of the fact that they’d stopped talking, that he was staring, glazed, up at Ryan with his mouth slightly parted, and that Ryan was running his thumb slowly back and forth across the nape of Shane’s neck. He understood, distantly, that this needed to be shut down immediately, but he could no sooner stop leaning in than he could stop bleeding. His hand was curled around the edge of the desk, inches from Ryan’s thigh. Ryan was gazing down at him, eyes gone dark. Shane had a terrible thought.

“Ryan?” he said slowly.

Ryan made a low noise in response.

“The line keeps spirits out, right?”

“What? Yeah.”

“Does it stop them from, say, throwing something _over_ the line? Such as, completely hypothetically, half a radio?

Ryan was silent for a moment. 

“Fuck.”

***

Shane had never made it down five flights of stairs so fast in all his life. Five minutes flat, and they were both on the street, breathing hard, the dark bulk of the building looming at their backs. Ryan kept checking over his shoulder, presumably for angry ghosts.

“Christ, Christ, Christ,” Shane chanted. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ryan, this is a nightmare.”

Ryan nodded.

“We have to go back into the park,” Shane said, appalled. He’d almost forgotten about that particular revelation, given what had followed. “We have to go back in the middle of the night, to look for an incredibly valuable rock hidden in a thousand acres of scrub.”

“Wait, no,” Ryan said. “We’re not going up there tonight. You’re hurt! It’s dark!”

Shane grit his teeth. “The ships are leaving tomorrow morning,” he said. “If Jack told his killers where he hid the diamond, then this is their last chance to grab it before they leave.”

“Oh, I see,” Ryan said. There was a touch of panic in his tone. “So, we’re going to go up there in the dark, while you’re bleeding from the head, _and_ angry men with military training are there waiting to murder us.”

“That would seem,” Shane said, “about the shape of things.”

“Right,” Ryan said, drawing himself up. “I guess I’ll go and phone a cab.”

***

Over the course of his life, Shane had grown good at waiting. As a child in Illinois, he’d waited every year for snow with the patience of a miniature saint, only to then refuse to run through the perfect white quilt, or to scoop up handfuls for snowballs and ruin the weave of it. He’d waited to grow into his legs and been disappointed when he’d never developed the knock-about athletic prowess of the other boys on his street. He’d waited out the deep sense that he’d been put together ever so slightly wrong, until he’d finally understood that these were merely the contours of the mind he’d been given.

He’d waited for a good reason to leave Schaumberg, and when one had failed to materialize, he’d done it anyway. He’d waited for his life to resolve into something that made sense to him, and he’d taken jobs and offices and clients while he waited, until he’d ended up behind Tinsley’s door. He’d waited on street corners, and in parked cars, and outside pawn-shops.

He’d waited to see if the miniature oracle next door might be a friend, and then jumped straight into a partnership. He’d waited to see if his heart would let go of a truly awful idea, found that it wouldn’t, and tried to live with that.

Now Shane was waiting for a cab, standing with Ryan on their corner while a car threaded its way towards them through the evening traffic, ready to deliver them to what would undoubtedly be a deeply unpleasant experience, if not an outright catastrophe. He was waiting for his pulse to settle. He was waiting to forget the way Ryan had looked at him, his hand pressed against Shane’s forehead. And he was waiting for one of them to work up the courage to mention what the hell had just happened.

Not the part where they’d apparently been attacked by a haunted radio, Ryan had gone over that five times already. But afterwards – people didn’t touch each other like than unless they had intentions. Shane had spent enough time observing clandestine affairs to know that much. The streetlight overhead flickered, throwing Ryan’s face in and out of shadow.

Shane said, “Ryan, before –” at the same time as Ryan stuttered, “Shane, I –”, and then their cab sounded its horn as it pulled up beside them.

That was the problem with waiting. It often didn’t work.

“Later?” Ryan said, a hopeful note in his voice.

“Later,” Shane said, with a certainty he was struggling to feel.

***

Their second trip to Griffith Park was quieter than the first. Ryan tapped his fingers in complicated patterns against the door. Shane tried to remember if he’d ever written out a will, of if the State of California was about to inherit a very immoveable desk. He wondered if anyone had ever drowned in Ferndell’s restorative waters and what sort of plaque would be erected when he was the first.

The houses of Los Feliz were full of yellow light – it spilled from kitchen windows and living rooms, falling out into the street with a familiarity and warmth that was almost tangible. It made Shane want to go home, in a vast, abstract sort of way. Were Sophia and Etienne still turning on the lights at night, that old defense against a darkness which had already come? Perhaps they were still in shadow, waiting for the rupture in their lives to make sense, to mend, to become a bridge they could walk over.

Shane glanced over at Ryan, watched him trace some arcane symbol on the upholstery. Now that he’d been so close, even the opposite ends of the backseat seemed impossibly far away.

The lights dwindled, then faded behind them as the cab pulled to a stop under the trees of Fern Dell Drive. Again, Shane paid the driver to wait.

“It’s all right; I’m a detective,” he said firmly as the man eyeballed him suspiciously, and then he and Ryan headed out into the greenery.

If the foothills they’d been driven through on Friday had been trammeled by the city, then here was a place which had been laid over the knee of progress and had its spine broken. Ferns curled prettily from every surface, hanging over _faux bois_ fences, spilling across the walk, and tumbling down to the manicured creek. They exploded from a hundred trellises and terraced pools. Shane smacked his flashlight against his hand, and its stutter resolved into a clean beam of light.

Ferndell was eerie at night. A suburban yard might turn feral and unrecognizable in shadow, but here there was nothing wild for the land to go back to. It was more like being locked in a shop after closing, uncanny and bereft. The sort of shop where there might be a bobcat waiting behind the counter. Shane swept the light around in a broad circle. Just behind him, Ryan did the same. Lots of ferns. No glinting eyes. Importantly, no glinting diamonds.

“Well, Ryan,” he said. “Are you sensing the shimmer of immortality on the water, or should we inform these people that they’re frauds?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Ryan said, but there was an edge of hysterical laughter in his voice.

“I think I’m sensing the shimmer of mosquitos on the water,” Shane continued. “I guess we should look around.”

They set off down the narrow path, Ryan jumping at every fern that brushed against his ankles. Shane scanned the ground on either side of the trail, hoping for the half-buried hinge of a box, or an obvious hollow. Even under the threat of murder and theft, Ferndell was obnoxiously like a pixie garden – albeit one built by unsmiling carpenters on a backlot. It felt as though the entire façade might come down at any moment. Shane could see why starlets came here to take the waters: they probably felt right at home.

“I’m a little worried about running into one of the old ranchers,” Ryan said from behind him.

“Really? That’s what you’re worried about? Not the men who attacked us, or a mountain lion or –” Shane slapped a mosquito off his hand, “–malaria?”

“Malaria can’t throw a radio at me.”

“Yes, Ryan, all it can do is _kill you_.”

Next to them, the little creek burbled along, having not been told that the park was closed and its performance was now surplus to requirements.

“I think Jack’s gone,” Ryan said, as they paused at a cross-roads.

“What, was he in the car?”

“No, but I had … a sense, I suppose. I don’t think he can come out here, it’s too far from where he –”

“From where he died?”

Ryan nodded, the flashlight beams cutting his face into shadows. “Maybe he never came here while he was alive, so now he can’t.”

“And what a _treat_ he is missing out on,” Shane said. He could hear his own voice starting to fray. “I am so glad, Ryan, that _we_ have been here while we are still alive, so we’ll always have the option of coming back after death.”

“Shut up, I think I can hear something.”

Shane pulled a face, but fell obediently silent. He heard nothing but the distant rush of water and the faint sigh of a thousand ferns wishing for natural death. Ryan shook his head.

“We should split up,” Shane said, flicking his flashlight down both of the diverging paths, one after the other. “I’m sorry I cannot travel both, but I’ll let you pick first.”

“What?” Ryan said. “No, why are we splitting up? What if something happens?”

“If something happens, yell,” Shane said. “We’ll be faster this way. I bet this path joins back up; I’ll meet you in the middle.”

Shane watched as Ryan visibly steeled himself, and finally nodded. “Fine,” he said. “See you in the middle then.”

“Shout if you need me,” Shane said, and then turned to face his own fern-infested route. For a few seconds, he could hear Ryan’s footsteps rustling away, then the sound was absorbed into the murmur of the stream and the susurration of leaves.

His path was, all said and done, very much like the rest of Ferndell. Fake wood fences in ornamental twists. Rock walls. More ferns. An old tree that had long ago split near its base, its trunk reaching out in cardinal directions. It probably wondered what had happened to the scrub and grasses, and where these filigree strangers had come from.

Shane was halfway over another miniature bridge before he caught up with his thoughts and stopped short.

An old tree, split near its base.

_Four branches._

Shane shone his flashlight up along the tree’s curved limbs. Something had happened early in its life, causing its trunk to branch out in four different directions. Two of those boughs dipped over the path, the others were lost in the tangle of ferns. Shane felt the cold night air creep into his blood. Here he was. And a voice through the radio had sent him here. He _hated_ this.

He flicked the light back up along the bow of the nearest limb, and hit what looked like an open wound in the wood, a hollow where a branch had torn away, like an arm pulled out of the socket. From this angle, it was impossible to tell how deep the hole went, but it was probably deep enough.

“Oh, come on,” Shane muttered. This was a spectacularly stupid place to hide stolen goods. A diamond left in there would have been eaten by birds, or an opossum, or subsumed into the tree itself. And Shane was going to have to put his hand into the bottomless dark to find out.

With some difficulty, he wedged his flashlight between the fronds of a tree fern on the other side of the path, adjusting it until the light fell across as much of his bad idea as possible. Then, with rather more difficulty, he climbed onto the low stone wall that ran along the path and hoisted himself into the tree.

Shane hadn’t climbed a tree since childhood, and back then he hadn’t had any great aptitude for it. He was sorry to discover that the skill hadn’t developed in secret over the intervening years, and he almost fell several times before he had inched far enough along to reach for the hollow.

Wet, rotten wood. Damp leaves. His fingers crumbling through soft lignin. The spongy, velvet back of what was probably a dead mouse.

Shane yanked his hand away and almost tumbled out of the tree, cursing under his breath. At least nothing had bitten him. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and tried again. This time his hand closed around a small velvet pouch. Or, he supposed, a very old dead mouse. There was something hard rolling under the fabric.

Shane kept his fingers closed around whatever it was he’d retrieved until he was back on the ground, standing shakily in the floodlit path. In his hand was a tiny jeweler’s pouch, its maker’s name worn away with age. And inside the pouch were two bright-faceted stones, gleaming yellow in the torch light.

“Holy shit,” Shane whispered. “He was right.”

“Glad to hear it,” an East Coast accent said over his shoulder. Before Shane could turn, the cold snub of a gun pressed into his spine. “Now, why don’t you stand real still and put that in my hand?”

Cold dread swept over Shane like anesthetic. A hand was thrust into his field of vision, and he mechanically dropped the diamonds into it. He couldn’t see the man’s face. It didn’t matter; he probably wasn’t going to be making any police reports about it. All he could think was that he and Ryan weren’t going to get their later.

“Good decision,” the man said. “Now call your little friend out.”

Shane went perfectly, impossibly still. “He isn’t here,” he said. The only option was to keep Ryan out of this. “I came alone.”

The gun pressed a little harder. “You know, you’re not much of a detective, but you’re smart,” the voice said. “You, I’d trust to leave well enough alone. But your friend. Ah, now your friend I think would keep pushing and pushing, and I don’t want that. Call him, or you’re going to find you’ve taken your last step.”

“I told you,” Shane said, trying not to breathe. “He isn’t here.”

He heard the safety click and fear went through him like clean edge of a blade, but the shot didn’t come. It would eventually. Shane wasn’t going to give this bastard any other choice. If he called Ryan out here, Ryan was going to get shot in the head and nothing was worth that. Not the diamond, not Shane’s ability to walk, not his life.

“For a lawman, you sure do lie like a sailor,” the man said, almost laughing. “I heard you talking. Now, let’s try again. Call him over.”

“Why, so you can shoot us both?” Shane grit. He’d never considered that he’d be able to tell a man was shrugging based on the twitch of a gun barrel, but it had been a week of interesting discoveries.

“I’m sure he’ll come running anyway when he hears,” the man said, and Shane had just enough time to draw a breath, meaning to yell for Ryan to get clear, when a light fell across them, throwing their shadows across the ground. Someone on the path at their backs.

“Get the fuck away from him.”

Ryan. _Oh no._ Shane closed his eyes.

“Put everything you’ve got on the ground,” Ryan said in an even tone, “and step away.”

The man, not so easily dissuaded, jammed the gun harder into Shane’s back and swung him around, putting Shane between himself and this unlikely threat.

Ryan had a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, pointed steadily over Shane’s shoulder. Shane thought he felt his heart stop. Ryan met his eyes, and gave a tiny nod.

“Put it down,” he said again.

“I don’t think I will,” the man said. “And I think he’ll be dead before you get a shot off.”

Ryan didn’t lower his gun. He glanced at Shane. “Well, I’m a spiritualist,” he said. “I believe in an afterlife. I’ll speak to him again. How do you feel about dying?”

Shane had badly underestimated him. Ryan had steel running through his veins. Unfortunately, as Shane was about to die, the realization had come a little late.

He hoped he _could_ speak to Ryan … after. He wanted to be more than a whisper through an old radio, or a cold cup of tea. He’d keep breaking Ryan’s ornaments until his spirit ran out of strength. He’d scream until he was heard.

Suddenly the gun was gone from Shane’s spine.

“Jesus Christ, you are insane,” its owner spat. Shane didn’t dare move. He heard the quiet thump of something being set down on the ground.

“Thank you,” Ryan said calmly. “Did you come here alone? Yes? Good. Now, leave. Get back on your ship. If we ever see you in California again, I’ll shoot you in the fucking throat.”

Badly, _badly_ underestimated. Shane heard the man take a step back, and he instinctively scrambled forwards, until he was behind Ryan’s line of fire. He turned to see the navy man from the docks, Fairholme, with his hands up, scowling.

“Keep moving,” Ryan said, his voice so threatening Shane wondered if he would be party to a murder this evening after all – but then their man cut and ran, stepping out of the torch light and vanishing into darkness.

A moment of stillness, Ryan still sighting down the empty path, then another, and then finally Ryan lowered the gun. The light from his torch bounced as his hands started to shake.

Shane took two unsteady steps and collapsed heavily onto the stone wall. Ryan followed him over, carefully setting his gun aside.

“Shane,” he said in an uneven voice. In the wash of light, he looked shaken and panicked and like the kind of anchor that could hold Shane forever. “Shane, are you alright?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, holy shit, were you going to let him _shoot_ me?” Shane yelped.

“No!” Ryan cried in return. “I didn’t know what else to do! He was _pointing a gun at you_.”

“Yeah, Ryan, I had noticed!”

Ryan reached out as if he were going to grab Shane, then changed his mind, his hands fluttering about uselessly. “Are you alright? He didn’t –”

“He didn’t _shoot_ _me_ if that’s what you’re asking, though apparently that would have been fine with you!” Shane thought he might need someone to slap him.

“I thought I could bluff him!” Ryan cried. He might also need to be slapped, before they woke all of Los Feliz. “I needed to say it, because otherwise I would have just given him the gun and then he would have shot both of us, you said so yourself –”

“Ryan.” Shane had finally found him. “Ryan. Ryan, you did great. I’d have told you so on ghost-radio. I’d have haunted you until they day you died, you tiny maniac.”

Ryan’s eyes went wide, then he seized Shane by the lapels and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I? I took the one which led to armed conflict. 
> 
> Thank God, She’s Almost Out of Fun Facts: 
> 
> 1\. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, the springs at Ferndell had a reputation as a fountain of youth. When I was writing this in February, that seemed ridiculous. Now, in the cold hard light of April, I firmly believe that splashing around in a public pool with my friends would absolutely add at least fifty years to my life. 
> 
> 2\. Title, per usual, is kindly provided by Irving Berlin. 
> 
> As always, I hope quarantine is treating you all gently. Thank you for bearing with these boys as they ever-so-slowly got their act together. FINALLY. elmo_fire.gif


	6. Blue Skies

Kissing Ryan was like having all the lights turned on at once. Shane thought he might be glowing, which was a problem, given that the park still contained at least one murderous sailor and probably bobcats. It wasn’t enough to make him stop.

This close, he could smell the sweet incense that clung to Ryan’s hair and his clothes, to his hands, which were still curled in Shane’s jacket. He cupped a hand around the back of Ryan’s neck and held him close, as the world narrowed to the gentle scrape of Ryan’s stubble, and the heat of his skin, the sound of his breath catching on a sound that was almost a sob.

Shane wanted to keep him like this forever, warm and near and safe. He did not, however, want that eternity to be spent in Ferndell. Delicately, he pulled away, one hand still caught in Ryan’s hair. It took Ryan a moment to open his eyes.

“Well,” he said, once he finally did. “We should probably get out of here, right?”

“Yes,” Shane managed. “Probably. We have got a cab with the meter running.” He ran his thumb once more up the nape of Ryan’s neck before reluctantly letting him go; Ryan abruptly unhanded Shane’s jacket, which was now so crumpled it might never recover.

On the path behind them, seven million dollars’ worth of diamond was sitting abandoned in the dirt. Shane got to his feet, pleased to find his legs still worked, and carefully picked up the glinting gems. He was about to drop them back into their decaying jewelers’ bag, when Ryan stopped him.

“Can I?” Ryan asked, peering down intently. Shane reached out, took Ryan’s hand, and tipped the diamonds onto his upturned palm, where they caught the torchlight and threw it back as liquid fire.

“Huh,” Ryan said, moving his hand from side to side. “So he did have it cut down.”

“Well,” Shane said, watching Ryan. “The man did have two partners.”

Ryan poured the diamonds back into their bag and dropped it into Shane’s pocket. “Don’t expect any murder gems from me, Madej,” he said lightly.

“You literally just gave them to me, Ryan.”

“Shut up.”

Ryan turned to gather his gun, too fast to gauge his expression; Shane stooped again to collect the _other_ gun, slid it into his pocket, then went to prise his flashlight out of the ferns. When he turned back, Ryan was waiting for him, his own flashlight in hand, smiling.

Exhaustion and spent adrenaline had turned Shane’s limbs to lead, and the walk back through Ferndell’s serpentine twists felt interminably long. Ferns brushed gently against their legs; stolen property jangled softly in Shane’s pocket. His skin was humming in every place it had touched Ryan’s.

Finally, the mouth of the trail gave out onto the street, where the downy undersides of clouds were lit up by the city, half-hiding a spackling of stars. Further away, their cab was waiting – the driver’s legs were stretched out of the open door, his shoes resting on the asphalt.

“Oh, thank God,” Ryan said and stopped dead in the middle of the road, as if sheer relief had put out a hand and stayed him. “I thought we were going to be walking home.”

“Now when have I _ever_ made you walk home?” Shane said, reaching a hand into his pocket – the one that didn’t contain several million in loose change – in the hopes of a cigarette. His fingers brushed instead against the slim edge of a card.

He drew it out with two fingertips, like a pickpocket, and realized it was one of Ryan’s, the card Shane had taken for safekeeping at the Jenever and then never returned. Under the streetlamp’s glow, its two tiny figures stood naked before some winged god whose folded robes were the same dark lilac as the clouds.

“Oh, Ryan.” Shane handed it across. “I think I stole this accidentally. Here.”

Ryan took the card, frowning, and then looked up at Shane with wide eyes. “How long have you had this?” he demanded.

“Since we went drinking, I think. You were trying to read for me, and we got chased out before I could return it. Sorry.”

“Since _the bar_?” Ryan spluttered. “You’ve had this since the bar? That’s where it’s been?”

“Sorry,” Shane said again. He wondered how many ghoul connexions and communications he’d inadvertently ruined. Ryan’s eyes were flicking between Shane and the card with alarming speed. He looked like a man trying to figure out a magic trick. He looked stunned, like a man who’d been hit with an exploding radio.

“I hope I haven’t messed up your fortunes,” Shane said grinning, because he really couldn’t help himself. “I know how many people depend on your sound financial advice.”

“Shut up, you –” Ryan said. “You’ve really had it all this time?”

“Yup.”

“Unbelievable,” Ryan muttered. “Just – oh my God.” He looked up at Shane, and his gaze became purposeful and edged. Shane very much wanted to find out exactly how sharp that edge might be, if it would draw blood when thumbed, but they were still, _very much,_ in the middle of the road.

“I really do look forwards to hearing your full thoughts on this,” Shane said quietly. He reached over the plucked the card from Ryan’s fingers, brushing their hands together as he did so. “But now I think we should go home.”

***

It wasn’t until they were standing in front of their building, the time now one in the morning, that Shane realized the cab could have taken them to either of their _actual_ homes. Places where there were showers. Places where there were beds.

Evidently reaching this conclusion at the same time, Ryan said kindly, “It’s been a very long night,” then put a hand on Shane’s back and ushered him inside.

On the sixth floor, it was dark and cold – when Shane flipped the light in their office, the glare of the exposed bulb almost made him flinch. It did, however, illuminate his chair, into which Shane gratefully, immediately collapsed. 

He took the gun from his pocket, unloaded it, and slid it into one of his desk’s many drawers. Ryan locked the door behind them, pulled down the shade, and wedged Shane’s spare chair under the handle.

Then he crossed the room and dropped himself into Shane’s lap, taking Shane’s face in his hands.

“Are you all right?” he asked, turning Shane’s head to inspect the truly impressive collection of bruises and cuts Shane had curated over the past fortnight. Shane made a strangled noise in the back of his throat which eventually became a yes.

“Are _you_ all right?” he said, once he’d recovered from the sudden shock of _Ryan_. “Because I didn’t think you actually knew how to use a gun and –”

“Jesus,” Ryan said, and then he ducked down to kiss Shane again.

It was slower, sweeter, this time. Through the considerable distraction of Ryan’s fingers skating along his jaw, Shane realized that Ryan was being _careful_ with him. Light touches, the gentle press of his lips. Shane wondered what it would be like when he hadn’t been hit and scraped and almost shot, and Ryan stopped holding back.

The thought made him shiver, and he tugged Ryan closer, pushing up into his mouth until Ryan seemed suitably convinced that Shane wasn’t going to break; until they’d slid into something messy and hot and promising more. 

Shane wanted more. He wanted to take Ryan home, and to bed; wanted to kiss him when Ryan no longer had the height advantage. He wanted to bring Ryan coffee in the morning and complain about his ghosts and mess up his hair. Shane wanted to fan Ryan out like a deck of cards and see what futures he held.

They were flush from hip to chest, Ryan’s tongue was in his mouth, and he was working one hand between them to get at Shane’s fly, then his teeth dragged hard over the spot where Shane’s lip had split. 

Shane sprung back with a yelp of pain.

“Shit, sorry, sorry,” Ryan squeaked, pulling back. He touched his hand to the back of his mouth. “Shit, did I hurt you?”

“No, it’s fine,” Shane murmured. His heart was hammering in his chest; they were both breathing hard. Very slowly, he became aware that they were in the office, that they had no spare clothes left, and that the nearest shower was very far away. “We should probably stop, though. For now.”

“Yeah,” Ryan sighed. “I do have some standards and you definitely have dried blood on your face right now.”

“Not into it?”

Ryan swatted him across the shoulder, and then swung himself off of Shane’s legs. “Later,” he said darkly. Shane made a small noise of poorly-concealed want. A tiny part of him, the part that ran down adulterers for a living, was deeply embarrassed by such a heartsore sound. The rest of him felt how the streets must have felt when the new lamps were wired in – glittering so spectacularly the light was a living creature. 

“We should stay here, I suppose,” Shane said. “I don’t want to be wandering around in the dark until that ship is half-way to Hawaii. We’ll just have to suffer in place until morning.”

“That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Ryan laughed, and then his expression shuttered into caution.

“Well, I am a romantic,” Shane said quickly. “As you can see, I’m very careful to only bring you to the nicest places, such as cursed municipal parks and this _incredibly_ expensive rented room.”

Ryan smiled and leaned back against Shane’s desk. “Yes, I’ve heard it’s impossible for a single man to rent space here.”

“Well, you’d be entirely correct, Ryan,” Shane continued. “I happen to know for a fact that the only way anyone can afford this establishment is by clubbing together. It’s very Roman.”

“It’s very what?”

“Very Roman. They used to pool their money to pay for each other’s funerals.”

“Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Don’t say that. I was almost planning _your_ funeral tonight.”

“You’re the one who talks to the dead, Ryan,” Shane said sternly.

“Yes, but I don’t take this – _macabre glee_ in it.”

“I take macabre glee in you,” Shane said. He felt a little drunk on sleep deprivation, on almost having been shot, on Ryan.

“Did you get hit with the gun? Is that what happened before I got there?”

“Do you wanna shine a light in my eyes and find out,” Shane said, and then took advantage of Ryan’s laughed _“What the hell?”_ to haul him back in. This time he managed to get Ryan’s shirt untucked, and as he ran his hands up bare skin, he understood clearly that this man was going to be the end of him.

“Fuck,” he said against Ryan’s mouth, and then Ryan was pulling away again, eyes tight with frustration.

“I can’t believe I keep kissing you with your busted-up face,” he said, his nose scrunching up in distaste.

“I’ve got wiles,” Shane said, dazed. Every time he touched Ryan, he was stunned anew – like a bird who’d flown into a window, or a wireless radio that had flown into a million parts.

“This is terrible,” Ryan said. “I can’t believe we’re going to be stuck here all night. This is what purgatory must be like.”

“Well, you’d know.” At Ryan’s deeply unimpressed look, Shane made an effort to sober up. “Alright, come on, we can be professional about this. It’s almost morning, anyway. Let’s pull out some files and work late, Bergara.”

***

Shane was woken by the cold light of morning stabbing through the tiny window. The room was washed-out and close. His whole body ached. Ryan was sprawled asleep on the floor, half next to, half on top of him. It was a strong contender for both the best and the worst morning Shane had ever opened his eyes to.

They had not, by any means of the word, worked late. What they had done, because Ryan wanted disinfectant and Shane wanted a distraction, was methodically taken apart Tinsley’s desk looking for more _associates_. These they had found in the form of three unopened bottles, two of which potentially pre-dated Prohibition.

(“Does gin get better with age?” Ryan had asked, sniffing delicately. “Actually, I’m not sure this is gin, it might be petrol.” Then he’d tipped the mystery liquid over the cut on Shane’s forehead, and Shane had been forced to briefly reconsider the depth of his love.)

At about three a.m., they’d piled Ryan’s vast collection of table coverings in one corner in an effort to ward off the floor’s chill, and resolved to snatch at least a few hours of sleep before the relative safety of another pink LA sunrise.

Now, in the pale aftermath of that sunrise, Shane shook Ryan’s shoulder gently.

“Hey,” he whispered, voice rough. “It’s morning.”

The terror and exhaustion of the previous day had faded, and Shane found that he’d been left with a strangely full heart, affection like a new bruise. Ryan muttered and curled up on himself and Shane felt it as surely as if someone had shoved him in the chest. He let Ryan sleep.

The sharp scent of toasted wiring had faded from the room, but there was a faint scorch mark on the wall, a dark streak of soot like a smear of kohl. Carefully, Shane disentangled himself from Ryan, and, quietly as a man sneaking away from an assignation, slipped back into his shoes and out the door.

No one was about this early, only the barest suggestion of life behind the line of closed doors. Light caught the glaze on a thousand beige tiles like a director catching his star moonlighting as an accountant. Shane knocked twice on Stella’s door before she yanked it open, her blue overcoat and matching cloche hat in stark contrast to his own disarray.

“I know, I know,” Shane said, as she stared in silent horror.

“What, were you mugged on the way here? Were you mugged yesterday and they only just let you go?”

“It’s a long story.”

Stella held up a gloved hand. “I have no interest in hearing it.” She regarded him judgmentally for a moment before passing her sentence. “I will get you coffee,” she declared. “But I will need a favor in return.”

Shane heroically restrained himself from falling at her feet. “Of course.”

“Now, obviously I can’t go to the police about this, but I think a client has taken my good earrings…”

***

Ryan was awake and staring blearily around the room when Shane returned with two of Stella’s mugs in hand. He set them down on the desk and pulled up a chair.

“I brought breakfast,” he said slowly to Ryan’s uncomprehending face, and watched as the slow dawn of understanding broke.

“Oh my God.” Ryan scrambled to his feet and flung himself at his cup in the manner of a showgirl jumping into a very small bucket. The coffee itself wasn’t what one might traditionally call _good_. It had a bitter, just-burnt taste and it was slightly too strong. On the other hand, it was remarkably tepid.

Shane watched as Ryan drank without seeming to pause for breath. He was beautiful, he really was. Even with the morning light curdling on his skin, even in yesterday’s clothes and yesterday’s dirt, with his hair sticking out like he’d touched a live wire in his sleep.

Shane liked him so much it hurt. If Ryan touched him now, he’d probably just up and die.

“You’re looking at me a lot,” Ryan said, from around his coffee.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s alright. It’s not the, uh, most uncomfortable morning experience I’ve ever had.” Ryan colored slightly and rededicated himself to his drink.

“What, people don’t usually get their neighbors to make you bad coffee? You’ve not been treated right, Ryan.”

Ryan snorted. “Clearly. So, what do you think, is our would-be thief in the middle of the Pacific yet?”

“I thought you and the gun were very convincing,” Shane said. “I was very convinced.”

“You’re really not gonna let that go, huh?”

“The fact that you told an armed criminal to go ahead and fire into my spinal column? Yeah, I think I’ll bring it up every now and again.”

From the hallway, the lift clattered as it disgorged their neighbors into another unassuming day. Ryan looked down, toying with the spool of twine that Shane had never put away.

“Look, I know we were sort of running for our lives last night,” he said.

“I think I held my ground in the face of certain death admirably,” Shane interjected, and Ryan’s eyes flicked up to his face in exasperation.

“ _But_ ,” Ryan continued loudly, then stopped. “I meant it. I really did.”

Ryan started to unwind the string, twisting it around his fingers. There were dark, sleepless smudges under his eyes, and the collar of his shirt had been pulled askew to reveal the yellow-green edge of a bruise. Shane said the only thing he could think of that would keep his chest from splitting open.

“What, the bit where you said you’d be fine with me getting shot?”

Ryan glared at him. “No, you fucking – you know what I’m talking about.”

“I know,” Shane said quietly, holding Ryan’s gaze. “I meant it too. I mean it.”

All the tension left Ryan’s posture as he slumped forwards, propping his elbows on the desk. “Good,” he said. “That’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “It’s really good.”

Shane wanted to reach out and touch Ryan, but he wasn’t sure how to start. He thought he’d probably have the time to figure it out. 

***

The Moreno living room was hung with black crêpe. Shane, who had lost several layers of protective cynicism since he was last here, felt it keenly. He had a cup of tea cradled in his lap, the now-twin Florentine diamonds were sitting on the occasional table in front of them, and the story he and Ryan had just unfolded hung heavily in the room.

Sophia was wearing black now, as though the ritual might lend some structure to her grief. Etienne simply looked desolate: pale and windswept, like a man buffeted by a tireless wind. So far, he hadn’t spoken.

“Thank you,” Sophia said. “For finding out what happened.”

“Jack would have wanted you to know,” Ryan said. “And, I’m sure, for you to forgive him for getting in so far over his head.”

Sophia gave a choked laugh that was mostly a sob. “Well, of course. We always did.”

“What will you do now?” Shane asked gently. The diamonds flashed on the table – they were enough for a dozen new starts and then a dozen more.

“Get married, maybe,” Sophia said. “Now that there wouldn’t be an odd one out. Maybe move west. Where there are only winnowing fans, as the poet says. Somewhere away from the sea.”

“If you ever end up in Illinois,” Shane said. “I know people who’d be happy to help get you on your feet.”

“Thank you,” Etienne said, his voice rusty. “Perhaps the world will make farmers of us yet.”

“Mr. Bergara,” Sophia said, setting down her cup. “I know we haven’t spoken about this, but I read that sign on your door. You’re a medium.”

“I, well –” Ryan glanced at Shane, who shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You spoke to our Jack, didn’t you?”

“It’s not so much speaking. More smoke signals and semaphore.”

“Did he –”

“He wanted you to be safe,” Ryan said. “And I think he’ll be gone, now that you both are.”

For a moment Sophia held a hand over her eyes, but they were dry when she withdrew it. Etienne, who had gone somehow whiter, crossed himself and said nothing.

“The diamond was fairly well known,” Shane said. “But seeing as someone had the good sense to cut it down, it should be fairly easy to sell.”

Sophia and Etienne exchanged a look that Shane didn’t like one bit.

“We will not keep it,” Etienne said shortly.

“No,” Sophia agreed. “I don’t want to live on money that got Jack killed. I couldn’t bear it.” She leaned forwards and gathered the gems up. “I know we never discussed a fee – but I hope that these will cover your expenses?”

Without waiting for an answer, she placed them into Shane’s hand.

“Wait, hold on –”

“Etienne thought that stolen property might be involved. When I got that letter. And we want no part of it. Take them, please. I won’t feel happy until they’re out of the house.”

“If you’re sure,” Ryan said uneasily.

“We are. Take them. It would be a favor to us, though God knows you don’t owe us any more of those.”

“I – all right,” Shane said. Stolen goods were undoubtedly his least favorite form of payment, but without this particular theft he would still be waiting for his life to find him. To Sophia and Etienne, and to Jack, still so present with them, he said, “Thank you.”

***

“Well, that was sad,” Ryan said, a salt breeze blowing his hair back from his face.

They were on the docks again, the sea now a vital blue under a clear sky, the clean scent of the water rushing in with enough force to overpower the canneries and the lumber yards. Without the fog, Shane could see clear across the water to Terminal Island.

“You know they found bodies out there,” Ryan said, following his gaze.

“Great, let’s never go,” Shane said. “There’s probably ghosts.” The diamonds were heavy in his pocket, and the thought of having to find a fence, or worse, a safe place in the office to stow them was gnawing at him.

“For the record, I’m sorry you got hurt doing this,” Ryan said unexpectedly. He sounded so sincere that Shane turned. “But I’m glad we did it. I’m glad Jack came to me. We might not have … we might never have found each other, otherwise.”

Over the feeling of his throat closing up, Shane said, “I’m pretty sure it was our shitty landlord who brought us together, Ryan.”

Ryan waved the thought aside. “No, you’d still be chasing tax cheats and I’d still be reading cards for stockbrokers, we’d just be doing it in the same room. This is different.”

“Well, I’ll be the first to say it then: thank God for ghosts.”

“Shut up,” said Ryan. “You’re being an asshole.”

“Not into that either?”

“I’m going to smother you in your sleep.”

“Now, Ryan, we’ve been over this,” Shane said. “My incorporeal form will follow you ceaselessly. Every time you try to sit down to dinner, or go to wring money out of some poor stockbroker, there I will be.”

Ryan was clearly about to answer, his face a picture of incredulous irritation, but the mention of money had snagged on something in Shane’s memory.

“Hey, hold out your hand,” he said. Ryan shot him a mistrustful look, but did as asked. With the same relief Sophia must have felt, Shane tipped the little velvet bag onto Ryan’s palm. “I did say you could keep the fee on this one,” he said. “There you go. Congratulations, Bergara, you never have to work again. I cannot wait to be your kept man.”

“Oh no,” Ryan said, closing his fingers around the bag. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I do not want these cursed diamonds.”

“They’re not cursed.”

“Everyone who’s owned them has died!”

“I mean some of those people would be what, four hundred years old if they were still alive.”

“You know what I mean! Even Sophia agrees with me!”

“Well,” Shane said, shrugging. “A promise is a promise. I said you could have the fee if your ghost brought us a case. Your turn to get rid of them.”

Ryan looked down at his hand as though he’d been told to have it removed. He looked out over the water. A slow smile crept across his face.

“Shane, do you remember the note I left for you? About the dog?”

“Oh God, I’d forgotten I still have to deal with that. Jesus Christ.”

“They wanted a ransom, right?”

“Yes, for a _dog_. Through the _postal service_. This is the life I lead. Last chance to back out of being tied to it for good.”

“Do you think they’d accept two incredibly valuable, basically untraceable diamonds?”

Shane wheeled around to face Ryan. He was smiling broadly now, clearly thrilled with his own genius. “You cannot be serious.”

“Why not? Someone once sold the diamond for a florin because they thought it was glass. I think ransoming a pug would be a fitting new chapter for these incredibly cursed rocks.”

“It’s a Pomeranian,” Shane corrected automatically. “Do you even know what a florin is?”

“Anyway, you gave them to me. If I want to send them to kidnappers, that’s my business.”

“I guess worst case scenario is they got lost in the post,” Shane mused.

“Right, and then the postal service is cursed.”

“Well, better the postal service than you.”

“See, you can be sweet.”

Shane scoffed. He wanted to run his fingers through the tangled sweep of Ryan’s hair. He wanted to drag him behind one of the harbor buildings, and find out if he could taste sea-salt on Ryan’s skin. “Tell no one,” he said instead.

“Yes, I wouldn’t want to damage your reputation,” Ryan said. “Come on, we’ve got a small dog to rescue.”

Shane followed him away from the water’s edge, off towards another deeply awful idea. As he turned to get a last glimpse of open water, something strange flickered in his vision. The figure of a man, standing out in the middle of the harbor, like a frozen spiral of spindrift. Sunlight seemed to filter through him as he gazed back towards the dock. Gulls cried out over the fishing fleet. For a moment, Shane just stared, peering through the bright glint of the water. Then he tipped his hat to the illusion, and turned back to Ryan.

***

In the end, they scraped Tinsley’s name off their door. Among his many other strange talents, Ryan turned out to be a capable hand with a stencil and a brush, so they bought a pot of paint and threw a sheet over the ground, spent an afternoon laughing and catching bemused looks from the sixth floor’s few visitors. When they were finished, Shane’s clothes smelled faintly of turpentine and there were little flecks of gold on Ryan’s hands. The door read, in shining new letters:

S. Madej & R. Bergara

_Investigations_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone wanna hire some GHOST DETECTIVES?! 
> 
> Final Fun Facts:
> 
> 1\. The story of the winnowing fan is again from The Odyssey. The seer Tiresias is summoned from the dead, and instructs Odysseus to take an oar and walk inland until he finds people who, having never known the sea, mistake the oar for a winnowing fan. 
> 
> 2\. Ryan is not entirely correct about Terminal Island – bodies were found, but on Dead Man’s Island, which would be demolished in 1928 to enlarge the harbor. 
> 
> 3\. Title is, for the final time, from Irving Berlin. Blue Skies is one of his better-known works, and while it was written in 1926, it would be used in The Jazz Singer in 1927, thus becoming one of the first songs to feature in a talkie. And so our notes have come full circle!! 
> 
> And we're done!
> 
> Big, big shout-out to my Fight Director/ beta reader who saved this story from my complete lack of martial knowledge and my aversion to hyphens, all while receiving nothing in return but constant, unending conversations about trams. Thank you, I love you, I promise I’ll stop pausing movies to tell you about streetcars. 
> 
> You can find me and my roulette wheel of interests on tumblr @desmoulitions.
> 
> Finally, thank you all so much for reading! It’s been a very strange time, but it’s been the absolute highlight of my quarantine to get to sit at the digital campfire and tell this story. I hope that soon we’ll all be out in our (newly safe) meat-spaces once more, but until then may you have fair winds, following seas, and only friendly ghosts.


End file.
